


we look both left and right

by theatrythms



Series: i guess that this must be the place [4]
Category: DC Animated Universe (Timmverse), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Bart's life in the future, Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, Family, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Season 3 Spoilers, Survivor Guilt, Wally West is Alive
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-05-31 01:52:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19416040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theatrythms/pseuds/theatrythms
Summary: There’s some people Bart misses with all his heart from the future, and some people Bart loves with all his soul in the past.Wally West fits into both of these categories.Or; Wally and Bart, future, past and present.





	1. future i, past i, present i

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many THINGS to say abt this  
> i have reason to believe that in bart’s timeline , artemis doesn’t go on her mission , and neither does kaldur . i feel like the original timeline has the reach come as quite a friendly body , and as they have dealt with alien lifeforms before , no one has any reason to be suspicious . bart doesn’t mention artemis not dying in the future . ADDITIONALLY kaldur’s mission is to take down the light and the new partner . if i’m gonna be honest , i will say that kaldur finding out black manta is his father is the catalyst for the difference in the time stream . additionally , in their time stream , not just on the intervention of bart , kaldur’s mission is successful  
> anyway its a bit nonlinear

**future i - we look both left and right**

Bart wakes just before the generators crawl to life, just as he does every morning. In the dark, his hands fumble around the posts of the bunk bed, careful not to roll over and fall out. When his fingers find his goggles, he grins, unwrapping the strap from the metal bar and slipping them onto his face. Bart blinks, as the rosy hue brings the light back to the room.

Carefully, he climbs down the ladder, ignoring the parts that are sure to creak and groan against his weight. Aunt Dawn sleeps soundly on the bed opposite his, chest rising and falling in each breath. She still wears her surgery scrubs, the frail blue fabric brushing her red hair at the nape of her neck. Slowly, Bart pulls her discarded blanket off the floor and across her shoulders, careful not to wake her when he turns her over. Her round, brown glasses are still on her face, leaving creases on the sides of her face, and the long bridge of her nose.

(There’s a cracked mirror on his wall that shows him shaggy red hair and big green eyes, still gaunt and still pale, even in the rosy goggles. They say he looks like his dad with his grandmother’s jaw and grandfather’s nose, and thin lips from his mother. Bart feels like a mosaic of the missing faces of the people he’s never really known.)

If Dawn knew he was up, she doesn’t make any notice, only settles deeper into her bunk. His stomach curls, with something almost like pride, it meets the nerves that’s been brewing in him ever since he was sent to bed the night before, given a promise that he’d be woken if anything happens.

Waking up to Dawn stumbling into the room, making a beeline for her bed, just proved they’d forgotten to find him.

Still, there’s too much to be done for him to sulk about it.

Bart’s been creeping around the Cave at night for as long as he can remember, slipping the door open and closed, sneaking into the dark while everyone else slept. The corridors and corners are dark, save for the green lights above every door, and the small golden sheen of the plates on them that indicated who lived inside. The whole place started out as junction between the Cave used by the Justice League and a meeting point of the Happy Harbour Batcave, after the Cave was partially destroyed in 2016. 

Bart keeps his hand on the wall, walking slowly through the living first set of living quarters, the ones closer to the surface. Soon he’s out into the general areas of the Cave, the epicenter for the rest of the underground town.

The main, hallowed room with the computer screens used to have an entrance, that would open like a metal mouth and bring you out onto the beach, or so Mal says, before the first Cave was bombed. But then when everyone moved into the Cave sometime around 2034, they had to start digging downwards, to make more room for everyone. And now there’s a shiny, silver hatch in the very darkest and deepest parts of the bunker, lit by the generators and glowing a sickly green from the lights. The medbay, like Bart’s bunk, has been around since it was the headquarters of the Justice Association of America, in slightly better shape than the newer additions deeper under the earth, where the walls are smooth earth that’s cold to touch, not the stone from the rest of the mountain.

Bart’s feet are light and careful as he pads across the floor. He passes the empty kitchen right as his stomach starts to growl, pinching at his sides. Breakfast doesn’t start for another hour, at least, not until the churn of the generators gets the Cave up and running. Breakfast for Bart are the same porridge rations everyone else gets, followed up by a special, syrupy vitamin juice Bart has to drink all in one before he gags, to try and control his metabolism.

It does and it doesn’t work. Bart still has gnawing hunger pains, but he doesn’t get lightheaded or dizzy during the day.

When he reaches the sturdy, steel doors of the medbay, Bart takes a sharp deep breath, focuses all of his cells and atoms and molecules, and starts to shake, passing through in seconds. When Bart was younger he couldn’t control it very well; he’d phase through the bunk and land on mom with a thump and a laugh, and mom would let him stay in her bunk for the rest of the night, holding on tight so he didn’t slip away while she slept.

(And when Bart was even younger, he phased through the floor of their room. The ground of the room below them got closer and closer, heading for a bad collision until dad was there, the way he always was, and caught him to his chest and didn’t let him go.)

Only one part of the medbay is open, one of the smaller, more private rooms at the end. With a quick burst of speed, Bart phases through the door, his goggles adjusting to the low lighting before his own eyes did.

And in the private room, the rest of Bart’s family are rolled up in a deep sleep, in awkward positions, on awkward makeshift beds. 

On the actual bed, Artemis is curled around her daughter, one hand tangled in her blonde hair, the other holding her hand. Alice’s head rests on her shoulder, the bend in her brow smooth in sleep. On the floor under them, Jai is nestled behind his husband Henry, still in his scrubs after the delivery. And in the corner, in a plush armchair dragged out from one of the other rooms, with his feet propped up on the bed, Wally snores fill the room with a low din, one of his hands held loosely in Artemis’.

And then, in the small adjoining room, next to them, the newborn sleeps, unaware of the rest of the world.

Bart has only seen babies in the movies and TV shows, or in the few baby pictures he has of himself. He tiptoes slowly toward the bassinet, just a head taller than the plastic rim. He’s also never been around a baby, much less one only hours old. As far as Bart is aware, the last baby born in the Cave was him, and that was nine years ago. This baby has a small head, and what he can tell is a long body, hands and legs swaddled into a red blanket. The baby’s face is small, pinched together at his nose, small eyes and pouty lips, red all over like the blanket, still vaguely sticky. Under their green cap, Bart can see tufts of dark brown hair pop out.

Bart keeps staring over the plastic cradle, until another pair of green eyes meet his.

“Hiya,” Wally’s voice is quiet, mindful of the sleeping baby. His hair is still bright red, but there’s lines on his face and his green eyes are tired, his wedding ring almost the colour of rust, and his face shows the stress of the night before. “Isn’t he cute?”

“He’s small.” Bart says, keeping his voice at the same level.

Wally’s finger rubs against the baby’s cheek gently, careful not to wake him. “Yeah, but I’d say he’s just about cooked.”

“Not early? Or late?” Seven months ago, Karen sat him down and explained  _ everything _ , including premature babies and all that comes with situations like that, and babies who come late, and some, very few that arrive on time.

“A few days over, but yeah, he’s all good.”

Bart nods, swallowing everything down. New experiences, new people, new things to learn are few and far between, and Bart wants to savor them all, count them on his fingers and tack them up on the memory wall in his mind. “What’s his name?”

Wally’s smile widens, clearly enamored by his grandson. “Apollo Wallace West.”

Bart gasps, his own smile spreading at the corners of his lips. “After Artemis?” He says, just a smidge too loud.

Wally nods, bringing his fingers to his lips. Below them, Apollo stirs, one small hand trying to break out of his confines, another leg trying to kick.

“Hey Bart?” Wally whispers, getting up from his knees with a click and a crick. “Would you like to hold him?”

The white wall is cold against Bart’s back. He stares, intently, at the way Wally scoops the baby out of the basket, mindful of his head, his back, his legs tucked against his stomach. He kneels down to Bart again, extending his arms out to Bart’s own cradle-position.

“Just be careful with his head.” Wally instructs when Bart reaches out to take him.

Bart barely has a minute holding him, admiring the little flushes of his eyelashes, the roundness of his cheeks, the smallness of his entirety, before his eyes blow open and his mouth parts, releasing a howling cry so loud it wakes up everyone in the next room.

The panic wells up, Bart keeping his clutch tightly. “Ah- wha- Wally!”

“Babies cry, it’s okay.” Wally laughs, taking him back without even flinching at the sound. Wally does have two adult children, groggy from sleep and confused at the noise, but he raised them all the same. 

(Alice and Jai West are twenty three and twenty one years older than him, and they’re strict in the way adults in here are all like;  _ I’m not telling you off because you’re being bold, I’m telling you off because you’re putting yourself, and therefore, everyone you love, at risk.  _ Jai is sneaky, snarky, dry-witted in the bad times and electric in the good times, and Alice is more like Wally, always there and nice and warm for hugs.)

“It’s good when babies cry, means they need us.” Wally just keeps looking at his grandson, cooing as the crying gets more and more intense, the strong pushes and pulls from his chest. “Anyway, this one needs to eat, and so do you. I’m sure the kitchen is up, go on, run and grab some breakfast and come back here.”

Bart goes to object, peering into the room behind them, as Henry and Alice and Artemis talk lowly. Bart doesn’t wanna leave, back away from all of this when he could be needed.

Wally seems to get this, smiles again. “Go on, we’ll all still be here when you get back, I promise.”

(When dad died, and mom left, and grandma died, the first thing Wally said to him is that he’d always be there when he needed him. Bart was six years old and already didn’t like relying on others, but asking Wally for help never felt like needing help, just having a crutch to lean against, a north star to keep him forward.)

Bart nods, stands on shaky legs, and speeds back to the kitchen.

They’ll all be there later.

-

Life in the Cave is an awkward one. He goes to school and he helps out with chores and he stays out of the mission room and he doesn’t ask too many questions, even if it means Bart spends half of his life being confused and wondering what’s actually happening above ground.

The only enjoyable part of the day is when Batman orders for someone to open the shaft, and then someone takes Bart to the surface to ground all the lightning running around his veins. There’s a slim road next to the underground bunker that has League tech in a net above them, the grey soot collecting on the rope. The League’s tech is all pre-World War II radios and machines, because of the Reach, along with LexTech and the garbled legacy of WayneTech, everyone has seemingly forgot about the time before computers and bugging and microchips.

(The League still uses computers and bugging and microchips, just decades behind whatever strides the Reach has made since coming to Earth.)

Wally takes him out each day, watching him run down the beaten path, trying to help as much as he can. Bart hasn’t seen him run in years, not with his age. And he never goes on missions anymore, and neither does Dawn, Artemis and Alice. Jai risks it, in the name of taking down the Reach, wanting to go out in an expressive show of  _ fuck you alien scum _ . Bart’s much, much faster than them, but getting caught by the Reach and having an active—even if it’s weak—metagene is a death sentence. 

It’s a one way ticket to Reach custody. Bart doesn’t know much about it other than it’s where his mom went, a few years after dad died, and left him with Grandma and Wally.

(Reach Custody—the superhero way of taking the soup, throwing in the towel, lay down and surrender. The League—and what a little League it is—try to avoid losing numbers, when the other branches of Reach Resistance were dwindling and falling into servitude, but these things couldn’t be helped, not when people needed resources the League couldn’t provide. The Reach wanted willing slaves, people desperate enough to leave their ranks for a life that could be, possibly, marginally, hopefully, better than fighting a losing battle against the new lords of the earth. The Reach would rather let the ants come to them then waste the energy forcing them out of the anthill.)

Bart peers at the dark mountains, knowing that behind them, the Reach workcamp keeps going, just waiting until the day the League makes one wrong move, and their entire system, entire life, is gone.

But against that threat, the League still goes on, still does what they can, because that’s what heroes do. Sometimes the fear gets Bart so bad he just wants to curl up on his bunk, phase into the Earth and come back to a world where none of this is happening.

“Bart! You need to work on your breaking!” Wally calls, snapping him out of the doomy-gloomy thought train he’s gotten himself into.

Wally’s been fighting the Reach longer than Bart has; he can’t just give up here.

(You’d think, losing your mom to Reach custody when you were five would alter your whole life, but he remembers, faintly, Wally holding his hand out for Bart to take, a leverage to help him climb up into his arms and stay there, while Jade and Roy took Meloni to the surface. When Bart can remember his mom, he remembers harsh kisses against his crown, being held too tight, the strange mumblings and murmurings she’d whisper in the dark from the bunk below him. Losing mom was never that big of a deal, when Wally was there to fill his bunker with snores.)

“Why don’t we bring Apollo out!” Bart says instead. He wishes he could see the world through someone who’s never seen it before, find beauty in the white wasteland, art in the crooked mountain, life in the dead soil.

Wally shakes his head, hands resting on his hips. “Sorry Bart, he’s a bit too young for that.”

Life is full of limitations, Bart is coming to realise.

-

The Nguyen-Harper siblings all look like separate variations of their parents features, like mix-and-match with pigments and structures and shapes. Lian Nguyen-Harper used to be very pretty, almost a brilliant combination of her parents with a nose like a fold mountain and sleek amber hair. It’s her wide brown eyes, the twangs to her accent, and the scar is all her she has from her mother.

Nessie is more ruthless with her face, as if all of the French blood in the Crock family came to her at a point; high cheekbones and sweet eyes, a smoldering voice that sounds terrifying behind the grey and red Cheshire mask. She once went to France on a mission and came back with a wife called Tabitha.

Dean-Harper has all the recessive and dominant traits, dark black hair and bright blue eyes, a small pair of glasses low on his nose, to go along with his gentle disposition. Bart knows, sort of, that Dean-Harper was once Robin. The son of Cheshire and Red Arrow rising to Robin lasted a few short months, then like his grandmother, fell through nine stories and ended up in a wheelchair. He doesn’t know all of the specifics, or all of the facts, but that just goes into the never-ending list of things Bart doesn’t get told.

(He’s been buried most of his life, protected by all of the adults around him and he’s never even noticed.)

(The only guardian he’s ever had, and ever really needed, has always been Wally West. In every timeline and tense, in all the ways that matters.)

Sometimes, Bart comes into their living quarters and watches the same movies and TV shows, his head resting on Tabby’s lap, feet propped up on Lian’s. Bart’s the youngest, and doesn’t get along with the other kids. It’s a nice break from the rest of the family, who are still baby crazy and then Alice cries when Apollo does, and the whole room changes.

But the days still drip and drip on, each day feeling slower than the last.

**past i - time to pretend (let me crash here for a moment)**

Bart arrived in the past feet first, and he’s been backwards ever since.

He crashes like a rolling hurricane, and of course, the world is never the same.

(Literally—he’s gonna change the time stream.)

It’s hard to navigate the past, and how the way time seems to go differently, caught between moments of long, languid space, or quick, rapid days that seem to blur and bleed all in one. Weeks start on Sundays, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and the world is always too big, always too wide. It’s the past, and everything is brighter and the air is clearer. 

Bart wants to see it all, but he doesn’t quite know what to make of it. 

So he’s started a cheat sheet, to help remember the delicate lines that separate the future and present, and all the different characters that play different parts in different time streams.

Dick Grayson is an old man with arthritis who taught him to read. Dick Grayson is Batman.

Nightwing assigns him missions. He’s also not an old man, does not have arthritis (yet), did not teach him to read (yet, possibly), and is certainly not Batman (yet).

Garfield Logan is a superhero turned sitcom actor who Bart’s never met, but watched a lot of reruns of. Any metahuman in the Justice League is someone Bart has never met, a fable to go to sleep with, a legacy never filled. The metahumans, and the metahuman trafficking crisis, was the Reach’s way of keeping humanity without the powered heroes.

Gar Logan, and Beast Boy, is a hyperactive kid three months younger than Bart is (technically), who might just talk more than Bart does, asks more questions, and will be as loud as anyone will let him.

(Childhood, growing up in the past, must be one odd experience.)

Barbara Gordon is Batgirl, and just as warm, and friendly, and Barbara Gordon is also Oracle, who finds Bart in the weirdest parts of the Cave, always around every corner, just this time without the tell-tale sound of her wheels turning.

There’s a few that helps ease Bart’s homesickness, and seem exactly like they are. Tim Drake in the past is still the Tim Drake that nagged Bart about studying maths; Mal Duncan is big and friendly and is always up for a joke; Karen Beecher is still not as appreciated as she should be, and even offers to try and make Bart’s special smoothie to keep his metabolism under control.

And Blue Beetle is a warlord who enslaved the earth, the killer of hundreds, if not thousands of people, a tool of the Reach to keep humanity under ground, worked into submission.

(“What was Blue Beetle like, before y’know, taking over the world?” Bart asked, as casually as he could.

Wally thought for a second, wrinkled hands catching the stray pieces of soot falling from the sky. “I think,” He took a deep breath, as if it was hard to remember. “I think Blue Beetle was just a kid that got taken advantage of, and we didn’t realise until it was too late.”)

(It says a lot about Wally, who could look at his enemy and still find the human underneath.)

However, Jaime Reyes is a teenage boy, with the roundest brown eyes, and the nicest laugh, and a constant cloud of anxiety and misfortune that follows him around, attached to his spine.

(Really, this is how all of Bart’s problems begin.)

-

The second problem is the fact Wally West, in this timeline, does not like him.

A few days after the Neutron incident, after being interrogated by Batman and Superman and trying really, really hard to keep his mental shields up so M’gann and her uncle don’t see anything, Joan and Jay go to occupational therapy and leave him alone in the house. He goes to Grandma and Grandpa’s house first, who are still in some panic-euphoria-rinse-and-repeat cycle as they come to terms with being expectant parents, who then suggest, maybe a quick visit to Palo Alto might be a good way to pass the time.

(Bold of them to assume Bart knows what Palo Alto is, and where that is.)

“Wally goes to school in Palo Alto? It’s where he lives, with Artemis?” Iris says, as if this information is as common as mud.

Bart wiggles his fingers around. “And Palo Alto is…?”

“In California?” Barry continues, still freaked at the idea of interacting with his unborn grandchild from his unborn son. Bart really can’t blame him, but he’d appreciate if he lost the stiffness around him.

(But again, bold of them to assume Bart knows where California is. Some time, twenty years from now, California sinks into the ocean, so it’s so incredibly old school to imagine people living there, or going to school there.)

“Here,” Iris says, handing Bart a pile of fresh smelling laundry in a bin bag. “Wally left this at his parents’ house, I was gonna get Barry to run over with it, but now we have you.” She smiles, and it spreads something warm through Bart’s chest.

“Righteo grandma, I’ll get this over to Palo Alto in a snap, crackle and a pop.” He says, swiping the bag with a little push from his speed.

Inventing future slang is hard, but it throws off the scent that humanity’s future is doomed.

Palo Alto, Bart finds forty minutes later, after a lot of backtracking and almost falling into the sea, is a city in California, and after another three minutes of circling around cushy neighborhoods with dogs and white fences and children on bikes, he finds a green house with a set of stairs crawling up the side. He checks the address hastily written on his hand, checks the mail box next to the stairs, and almost ends up with a baseball bat to the head while he rummages through strangers’ mail.

(Well, they’re not really strangers.)

“Who are you?” A very tired, but still pissed off voice asks. Bart’s head swivels left, and to his utter horror, and utter joy, Artemis Crock is standing in front of him, in casual, Saturday wear, ready to curbstomp him for stealing their gas and electricity bill.

(Bart hasn’t seen Artemis since he was eleven years old, when one of the unfinished, unused portions of the Cave collapsed, and seeing her alive, and well, and healthy, and not buried under rock, might just hit Bart like a sledgehammer.)

“Oh jeez,” Another voice says from the stairs, Wally in his own Saturday morning, longue clothes, which happens to be basketball shorts and one of the many Stanford t-shirts that followed him into the future. “How did you find out where I live?”

Bart flounders, throwing up the bin bag, as if that’s an explanation in itself. “Grandma and Grandpa send their love. And fresh undies.”

Artemis takes the bag, making her own hole in it by ripping open the side, and frowns at the contents. “You do know we own our own washer and dryer, right?”

Wally shrugs, scratching the back of his neck. “Nothing beats your mom doing your laundry.”

“I’m also very, very,  _ very  _ bored and I’m not quite mission certified yet and the Cave is empty, unless I wanna hang out with Dick--I mean Nightwing hehehe--so grandma and grandpa sent me here.”

“What about Joan and Jay?” Wally pinches the bridge of his nose, clearly irritated, half because of Bart interrupting his blissful Saturday morning, and the other half for Bart’s mere presence. “And stop calling them grandma and grandpa, okay? It’s weird?”

“Well then what should I call them? Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry-”

“Definitely not!” Wally flares, almost comically, and even Artemis stifles a laugh.

She extends her hand, obviously cooled off from minutes before. “So you’re Bart? The one I’ve been hearing so much about.”

Bart takes it, gives her a hefty shake, with only a small propulsion from his speed. “Bartholomew Allen the second, at your service, but of course Bart is fine. I’ve rather taken to Impulse for my hero identity, so that works too I guess.”

“Artemis, and by the way, we don’t really talk about the whole ‘hero thing’ around here.” She gestures to the neighborhood with her head. “We live on the downlow, you get me?”

“Oooh, retirement, so crash! So retro!”

Wally cuts through. “Is this all you needed? To bring laundry? Because we have a lot of school work.”

Artemis holds a hand up to his chest. “School work we could use a break from. Bart’s come a long way to go back.” She turns to Bart, grinning. “Want some lunch?”

“It’ll take Bart like, half an hour, to get back to Central City, it’s not out of the way.”

“Actually, it was twenty six point nine minutes, but hey, who’s counting?” Bart corrects, wincing inwardly at Wally’s scowl.

Bart can still count on his hands the amount of times Wally, in his time, has yelled, scolded or gave out to him. Past Wally is looking to surpass that.

It’s also not that he doubted Wally when he said he used to have a rescue dog, a pitbull named Brucely, but the idea of having domesticated pets was so far-fetched and alienable to Bart, there was always a part of him that didn’t believe him. Their apartment is big, considering they’re two college students who work part-time jobs, but Bart loves how lived-in it feels, how homely it is. It stirs a weird collection and cacophony of emotions Bart isn’t at liberty to sort through at the moment, so he pushes them down, stored away for a rainy day.

(The weirdest things make him homesick sometimes.)

Artemis slides him a grilled cheese sandwich, a salad, three apples and a banana, yoghurt, a can of soda and three water bottles. Wally gets the same.

“Don’t look so shocked,” She jests, already starting her own, albeit smaller meal. “I’ve been feeding a speedster for six years.”

(It’s not Artemis’ understanding speedster metabolisms that shocks him, it’s the size of it, just how much food it is, that shocks him. Every meal he has in the past, he’s also repressing the urge to stuff it in his pockets so he can have it later. Old habits die hard, and all that.)

Wally’s already grumbling through his salad by the time Bart starts to eat, trying to look less afraid of the meal. Bart looks around the kitchen, the open-plan sitting room again, spying their laptops and books, sheets piled on the floor. Bart cocks his head, squinting at the writing.

“You study Vietnamese?” He says. He can barely make out the letters, since it was always spoken Vietnamese, not written, that he was taught.

“It’s an elective.” Wally says, voice muffled by the yoghurt.

Artemis pushes on the apples to him, looking curiously at Bart. “Why? Do you speak it?”

Bart’s rusty, but he tries anyway. He hasn’t seen Lian or Nessie or Dean-Harper in over a year. “I had some friends who did.”

(Some friends being their nieces and nephew and daughter and son that would huddle together and speak, letting their second voice ring true, like it was their own secret language.)

“Well,” She says. “You’re better than Wally.”

“You know I understood that.” He sulks, green eyes glaring at the both of them. “Besides, why did your friends teach you Vietnamese?”

“Multiculturalism is the future! Teach children about other cultures and you end up creating world peace.” Bart says, the lie falling through his teeth like satin. It’s easier to lie in english, because no one suspects a thing. He crosses his arms over his head and grins, unable to stomach the salad and yoghurt. “Whodathunkit?”

“Glad to know that the future’s in safe hands then.” Artemis says, staring intently at the food leftover. “You not hungry?”

“Can I have it then?” Wally asks, already spooning up the strawberry and vanilla yoghurt.

“Y’know,” Bart laughs, trying to keep it light, breezy, airy almost. Because if he doesn’t, the whole thing might crack. “In the future, we call that ‘declaring scavenger rights’.”

(“How come you manage to find all of this food?” Bart asked, in the early days of their internment.

“Our fellow prisoners have been so kind to introduce me to scavenger rights. If you leave stuff unattended,” Wally tossed the freeze-dried pouch to him, smiling warily. “It’s, by law, someone else to take.”

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in the Cave anymore.”

It was the rare moments, when he managed to make Wally laugh.)

“Fascinating, pass me the salad.”

Artemis rolls her eyes, and Bart pretty much decides there and then, that an upside to living in the past for the rest of his life, is being with Artemis again.

(Of course, fate is never so kind.)

-

The first funeral Bart has ever been to, but can’t remember, was his father’s, just after he turned three. It’s a year later, a little before he turned four, was Aunt Dawn’s, and there’s blurry, fuzzy memories of Grandma crying, and feeling more scared than usual. A year on, actually, is Grandma, more of her own choice than the will of the universe, and then just like that, the Allen family was down to two, if you include mom.

Six came, and so did the long, dragging hours of mom’s sickness, her mind unraveling against the stress, and trauma, of losing your husband and family and living underground. She used to think she was buried alive, or so she’d tell Bart, and he’d wake up to her clawing at the steel walls, trying to get out.

They didn’t so much as bury people in the future. Cremeations, regardless of what you wanted, was the only way. There were no fresh flowers at an altar, no large, imposing organ, no marble headstone. Only a eulogy, a prayer leftover from when religion was practiced, and then whoever claimed your ashes got to keep you.

But in the past and future, Bart can say he’s attended Artemis’ funeral in both time streams. The harsh contrast between the two ceremonies isn’t lost on Bart, the way the church wasn’t full, but the faces were familiar, and those that mattered were there, anyone who cared about Artemis. This time she has a grave, in a plot somewhere in Gotham. This time, there’s a body to bury.

“Why do you want to go?” Dick had frowned, when Bart tried to ask about the arrangements. To everyone, it was odd, seeing him so willing to go to a stranger’s funeral.

Bart stuck his hands in his pockets, fisting his hand around the flashdrive, with the faded Robin symbol on it. It almost took the pain away, helping ground him against the dreadful, careless wave of emotions rolling around him. “Wally’s family, y’know?”

Wally is family. Bart comes from the future. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Bart only brought two things with him to the past, the Impulse costume, which almost didn’t arrive in time for his departure, and a flashdrive, a backup, in case the past Justice League doubted him. Bart doesn’t know what’s on it, and the password is only something Meloni Allen would know, but it’s been the only thing tying Bart to the future.

(“If anything, and I mean anything, goes south, you take this to me, okay? You show this to me in the past.” It was a USB, barely longer than Bart’s finger, ridiculously old school and vintage, and Wally held it like it was ancient artefact, something to be handled with care.)

Bart runs across the US until the states blur into cities and he almost chucks himself into the roaring sea. He doesn’t know how he ended up in Palo Alto. The USB bites into his closed fists while he runs, not enough to break the skin, but enough to keep him in reality, out of the whirling speed and onto the ground. He takes the stairs up Wally’s apartment in twos.

What does it mean when things go south? Bart has never been on a mission before, Wally was once a superhero by profession, hobby, and obligation. The stories, and fables, and legends were never about missions going south, missions going wrong. Bart’s bedtime stories ended with the heroes saving the day.

Wally answers, and Bart flinches. There’s only so many times, and so many time streams, you can watch Wally West grieve.

“Bart, what do you-”

Bart doesn’t know what to say, caught between the persona he carefully crafted, and the shambling person he was in the future. Past Bart would probably make an insincere and probably insensitive joke about grief, and future Bart would do what Bart did for thirteen years, and ask Wally for help.

(What does going south mean? How south is south? How do you know the mission is unsalvageable? The urge to uncurl his fingers, stretch his hand across the distance between them, and ask Wally to watch it, uncode all of the secrets, and right all the wrongs Bart’s already made.)

(Bart does neither, the Reach invasion has barely begun. Some USB with all the answers in it won’t bring back Artemis.)

“I wanted to say, I’m sorry about Artemis.” He takes a deep breath, the tears catching in his eyelashes. “I didn’t really know her, but I knew her in the future, and I just really wanted to say that I’m sorry.”

Wally’s shoulders are sagging, face long. Somehow, he looks more tired and heavy then he does in forty years time. The odd, awkward contortions grief bends you into isn’t new for Bart, but it’s new for this Wally.

He just about meets Bart’s eyes. “Oh, uh, thanks Bart, that means a lot.” Wally clears his throat. “Artemis didn’t know you either, but, I think she liked you.”

Bart nods, clenching around the USB again. He left Joan and Jay’s with a purpose, and now he’s backtracked. “I just wanted you to know.”

Above them, the angry grey clouds crack and echo, the thunder getting closer and closer. It’s the little joys, of living in the future, that keeps Bart going. Like tilting his head back, feeling the warm rain hit his face, instead of the falling dark soot. He doesn’t smile, the way he did the first time he got caught in a rainstorm, but the same sense of gratitude fills his chest. Feels like a new home.

(Is it bad, to think that this is some message from Artemis, and all the people in the future he said goodbye to. Maybe the rainstorm is telling him he shouldn’t give the USB up, not just yet.)

“Christ, Bart,” Wally swears, pulling him in by the elbow. “Did you not check the weather?”

He’s still dazed, adjusting to the temperature and lighting change. “Huh? It was sunny in Central City.”

Wally stalks to the linen cabinet in the kitchen, pulling out a red fluffy towel. He deposits it onto Bart’s head. “Well, it’s always sunny in Central City.”

Bart shakes his wet hair out, earning a groan from both Wally and Brucely. In the corner of his eye, he sees the pile of blankets and sheets bunched up on the end of the couch. “Having a duvet day?” Bart tries to sound light.

“More like a duvet week. And stop dripping on the floor, even Brucley doesn’t do that.” Wally sinks into the sofa, eyes sliding closed. Brucely jumps onto his lap and whines, tucking his head into the dip in between Wally’s thigh and his hand. Wally digs the heel of his hand into his eye, shoulders hunching forward again. “I, stupidly, told my TAs that I don’t need an extension for my midterms.”

Bart sits on the other end, tucking his hands under his thighs. “Gosh, that’s not very crash.”

Wally hands him a cordless phone, incredibly old fashioned. “You can stay until the storm finishes up, just tell Jay and Joan where you are.” 

“Right, yeah, I can do that.” It’s almost embarrassing, how clueless Bart must look as he takes it from him.

“Landline eradicated in the future?” Wally raises an eyebrow.

“Something like that.” Bart’s grin widens. It’s like Wally’s reading from the same script. “World peace brings everyone into the digital age.”

Absentmindedly, Wally passes him a bag of strong smelling crisps. “Freeze dry chicken whizzies.” Bart mouths, turning the pack over in his hand.

“And free vaccines for all?”

“All illnesses and diseases are practically wiped out from the earth, no need for vaccines.” Bart’s arm still feels tender from the shots Black Canary gave him, who got him just as he was in the middle of rattling off some claim that by the time 2053 rolls around, herd immunity is just  _ that  _ successful.

Wally shrugs, and even if his words are bright and positive, and his voice is missing that same humor. He smiles, and it doesn’t crack his face. “Sounds like one hell of a future.”

“Yep,” Bart bites the wince back. “You have no idea.”

-

(You’re gonna love it Bart.”

“What?”

“The world.”)

-

**present i - as long as there are stars above you**

Bart’s only ever been to one wedding before. He was six years old, he didn’t have to wear a suit because he didn’t own one, and it certainly wasn’t on Happy Harbour Beach.

(It was actually several metres under it.)

Jai West married a man called Henry Hathaway, a doctor with a half-finished qualification, who deflected from the Reach because of an exhaustive list of horrors he’d seen while working in a Reach hospital. It was Jai’s job to go out of the Cave, undercover into the scraping of the population that made up people deemed worthy to live on the upper crust of society, and take the few select traitors who wanted out of the regime.

Boy meets boy on a high stakes mission. They got married two years later.

It wasn’t every day, that the League tried to do parties, or very often at all, really, but when they did, the joy got caught in Bart’s chest for the next few months, humming the wedding songs they played and trying to remember each and every detail, and each and every second. Jai’s smile was small, reserved even, when Henry took his hand at the makeshift altar, but that’s just how their love language spoke, quiet, against the chaos. Jai’s red hair managed to resist styling and stuck up everywhere, messy next to Henry’s sleek and shiny dreadlocks, their metal bands that would clink when they held hands.

(There’s a possibility Bart’s memories are softer than what the experience actually was. He was six years old, his father was dead, his mother was insane, but Red Arrow made enough cake for all of the underground dwellers and gave him extra frosting, and that’s what he remembers the most.)

M’gann and Conner’s wedding is an entire different level. Maybe it’s the shining sun, or the endless rows of seats and chairs, and over the two years he’s been here, he’s gone to his fair share of birthdays and anniversaries, but this wedding is different; he can feel it in his bone marrow. Ever since he woke up that morning, in his small box room in Jay and Joan’s, nothing felt right, and everything felt off.

Since Donny and Dawn have a role in the ceremony, throwing little flower petals from small weaved baskets before Conner and M’gann arrive, or so Bart observed at the rehearsal, the Flash family aim to get there early. Half an hour before the whole thing is supposed to kick off, Bart finds himself kicking sand out of his converse, and shaking the granules off his trousers. Bart considers he’s gone a bit extra with his wedding attire, with the floral, sky blue and blossom pink blazer over his white shirt and blue slacks, but first times on earth are big, important things, and a first surface-wedding feels monumentous, against the rest of his life.

He does a circuit of all the guests already there. Artemis, as the maid of honor, has important duties like wrangling children to stay in place. Dawn, Donny and Lian pull at their dresses and bows and wiggle their fingers in the dry sand, their babbling managing to drown out the laps of the waves. Bart recognises people from the Team and the League, and some of the babies from the baby group and their parents. He says hi to Violet and Brion, stops and talks to Mera and Artur, checks up with Kaldur since it’s been too long since he saw the guy. Will and Jade find Bart before he finds them, the newest member of the baby group looking slightly more relaxed than he’s used to seeing Jade. He makes sure to pinch Damian’s Wayne’s cute chubby cheeks and coo at his little baby tuxedo, that probably costs more than Bart’s entire wardrobe at home. He sits on Barbara’s lap in her high-end, all terrain wheelchair that has ribbons of the wedding colours, a soft pearl pink and a seafoam green, tied around the handles and threaded through the spokes.

A whole hoard of Justice League people, and friends, and family, and friends who have become as dear as family, and Bart can only look for one person. He feels incredibly lame for getting so agitated he’s not here yet.

“Jeez ese, you’ve gone all out.” Jaime says from behind him. He wears mustard yellow trousers and a white shirt, brown jacket balled in one hand, eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses.

Bart might just melt at the sight. It’s been almost four weeks since he actually saw Jaime, face to face. After finishing his first year of college, him and the other runaways went backpacking across Europe. He’d seen enough of the pictures on Instagram and Snapchat to know that they--Jaime, Asami, Tye, Virgil, Ed, Arsenal for three cities--were having a good time.

Bart still missed his best friend. He lets him know.

“Jaime! You made it!” He pulls him into a bone-crushing hug, the kind he grew out of three years ago. But unlike three years ago, Jaime returns it.

“Like I’d miss the wedding. This is the best League-Team team up since 2010, or so Zatanna said in the Whatsapp group.” Jaime lets go first, looking at Bart’s blazer with increased interest. “This looks insane.”

“You can thank Harry Styles for that.” Bart grins, fixing the cuffs of the jacket, giving him a chance to look closer at smaller, unnoticeable details of Jaime’s outfit and Jaime, that Bart desperately wants to notice. He’s not sunburnt from the continental European sun, and he’s shaved off the beard he grew while jumping between trains and buses and boats on holiday. He slides his sunglasses up his face, brown eyes big and wonderful and laughing. It also helps that he smells good, vaguely exotic, like some foreign aftershave or cologne. Or maybe he just brought the scents of Europe with him.

Bart smells like sunscreen, like a child would. Aunt Iris even brought a spare hat for him if he thought he needed it during the ceremony. Sometimes Jaime, and the older team members like Tim and Cassie and Steph make Bart feel incredibly lame, but that’s not as if the past and future have different concepts of what being a teenager is, but there’s much more freedom in the past, and with that freedom comes limitations.

“And hey, you’re looking good yourself.” He shifts into a dreadful, terrible French accent, despite having a fairly good grasp at the language. “Did the streets of Par-ree influence you, hon hon hon?”

Jaime shoves him, but laughs anyway, scratching behind his head the way he always does when he feels a little self conscious. “Actually, no. Mom and Milagro picked this out. They wanted to match it with a red shirt but I said that was your domain.”

In the three years he’s known Jaime, he’s spent hours, hundreds at least by now, in the Reyes home, eating Bianca’s food and teasing Milagro. Not to say he’s almost like family, but one time Bianca did say she wished Jaime had an appetite like him.

(It’s not at all the same.)

“Honestly, I think I look like a telenovela star.” Jaime continues, smoothing out the ends of his shirt. “All we need now is for someone to come back from the dead.”

Bart laughs, but it rings hollow. Bart’s always had fairly good gut feelings. This one hardly feels good. “I prefer a bit of an amnesia plotline myself, but hey, let’s go find seats in the shade so I don’t get sunburnt. Oh! There’s Tim and Cassie!-”

An hour later, Bart wouldn’t say he’s crying, but rather just misty eyed, at the whole affair. Like that first wedding, ten years ago (well, twenty seven years in the future, but who’s counting?), M’gann and Conner hold hands, only look at one another, and promise eternity to one another.

(Bart starts dreaming then, about someone looking at him like that and having someone’s hand to hold, and how it won’t be underground and he can get married in the open air, with the sun bright in the sky. One perk of living in the past that he’s able to imagine things like this, and almost see it to fruition, rather than just a throwaway fantasy.)

Of course, it’s always when things get easy, do things get worse.

The rolling, dark clouds come out of nowhere, halfway through the beginning of Conner’s vows. League and Team members alike stand to watch the clouds coming to a point in the sky just above the horizon, always ready for battle, even in wonderful times like this. And just when Bart thought it the worst of it was coming, the sky opened up, and spat out someone, the clouds gone as quickly as they came.

Well, it’s not just any person.

Bart, thanks to his super speed, watches someone fall out of the sky in slow, agonizing seconds, trapped in a place where time seems to go differently, feeling helpless on the sand, as they fall through the sky. The person wears red and yellow, and for a split second, Bart thinks he’s looking at himself, with red shaggy hair, and the Flash symbol right on his chest.

(Maybe it’s his future self coming back to kill him, take his life and live it for his own.)

But that sounds more plausible, more explainable, more real, than Wally West falling into the sea.

(Only one other person has worn the yellow and red suit, and even Bart doesn’t feel like he deserves it.)

The whole crowd descends into questions, everyone looking for answers. Aquaman is already, Wally or not, getting ready to dive into the sea to stage a rescue. Bart looks around, finds Iris and Barry with ashen faces, that no doubt mirror his. They saw him too, Bart guesses, and hopes, because he doesn’t want to be the only crazy person imagining this.

Then Jaime grabs his wrist, brows furrowed in a way that can only indicate the scarab has told him something.

Bart’s breath catches in his chest.

“Bart,” Jaime says, but he’s already gone from his seat and over to Iris and Barry before he can even blink.

That’s all he needed to hear.

“Did you see him too?” Bart asks Barry, grabbing his grandfather and shaking him out of it. The tears come before Bart even realises he’s crying, but his hands keep shaking, and the longer they stand here the more critical things could get. “Did you see  _ Wally _ ?”

“If it is him,” Iris says, after a beat of silence, more to Barry than him, but her hand still finds Bart’s and when she squeezes it he knows exactly what she means. “Bring him back to me.”

Bart doesn’t wait to see if Barry follows him. He gets to the edge of the surf until the surf meets him, the water crackling with a shock of blue lightning. Someone hits the ground with an almighty screech, the sand sizzling as it burns.

“...temisArtemisArtemis _ Artemis. _ ” Bart hears, and the whole beach goes silent.

Bart is a teenager born in 2040, living in 2019. He likes to think there’s very few things that seem abnormal, or strange, or anything out of the ordinary. People falling from the sky, falling into the sea, washing up from death, is all of the above.

The original team, the ones that started everything, run to Wally first, hold him up as he twitches. His suit, the distinct Kid Flash one, is torn and charred and leaves his pink skin exposed. When they’ve cleared, Iris wraps her arms around him and sobs, and laughs, and scolds him for going off and getting himself killed. Bart looks away from them, remembering all the grief and anguish she’d suffered through, and all the work she put into moving through them.

(“You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you have to go through it.”)

(Bart has dreamed about the homecoming he’d have, if he was ever able to go back, in the timeline where the Reach were defeated in 2016. His dad would be there, mom would be there, Aunt Dawn too. The rest of them would still be there, wandering out of the world like Bart’s own voice led them from the depths. Lian would be there, with or without her scar but her smile would still shine through. Nessie and Tabby, Dean-Harper would be happy to see him again. Jai and Henry, Alice and Apollo would be safe, Artemis waiting to wrap him up in a hug. And more importantly, most importantly even, Wally would be there, and the future would carry on, like it was supposed to be.)

“Is that… Bart?” Wally croaks out, raising a hand to block the sun from his eyes.

Bart slumps into the sand, ignoring the state of his suit. Something wet drips onto his hand, making him flinch, forcing him to remember he’s still crying, heavy tears spilling down his cheeks. He feels too raw to speak.

He does anyway. “Yeah, yeah Wally it’s me.”

Trembling, he reaches for Wally’s hand, the fingers of his gloves burned away. Whatever fierce energy that’s radiating around Wally goes straight into Bart’s hand, shocking him up his arm and through his chest, spreading all around him, filling his chest with warmth. All the guilt he buried down from the Arctic runs cold through him again, the fear that choked him when the wind died down and it was just him and Barry, watching Wally fade away against the lightning. Wally looks at him oddly. Bart almost expects him to say something, be angry, yell at him or something, for leaving him in the winter, taking his life away.

Instead Wally grins, wincing even if it hurts. “Jeez, I didn’t recognize you. You’re so tall now.”

Bart’s smile is watery, caught against all the emotions. “And here I thought I knew how to make an entrance.”

“Couldn’t miss the wedding… M’gann and Conner are family..” Wally coughs, relaxing deeper into Barry’s arms, already exhausted from the few minutes he’s been here. “Besides… I missed the last League-Team team up.”

Bart can’t keep the words tumbling out of his mouth. “I missed you!”

It only seems fair, that Bart’s seen Wally West die twice, only for him to come back. Bart’s knew Wally West in the past for less than six months, but in the far future, Wally is his first cousin once removed, who raised him, when the rest of the world went away.

And now the world has come back

  
  



	2. future ii, past ii, present ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay !! so sorry for the delay !!! im trying to get this neatly wrapped up but ta-da !! theres actually four chapters !! additionally , ive been going into sociology overdrive imagining the type of world under the reach empire is . I’m from Ireland ! And i took a lot of inspo from irish history as a colony of the British empire to shape the idea of a Reach occupation . I imagine the cave wouldn’t have everything outside of basic necessities for survival , like aducate support for seriously ill people , but they absolutely make do with what they have. Bart’s mission is really just a desperate attempt to save themselves, and i rlly wanted to protray how difficult that is for the people Bart leaves behind .  
> also i guess this fic is offically non canon compliant ??? id rather not touch will/artemis lmao and i havent caught up fully with s3 hahah but i hope you enjoy !!   
> ps ; an echo scan is a heart scan used for checking heart failure

**future ii - we’ve learnt every mushroom cloud has a silver lining**

When he wakes, the Cave isn’t up yet, even if the generators have already risen. The world shifts in the dark, the few holes of light slipping through the door, as reality sweeps back to him. Above him, he hears Alice turn away from the door and into the wall.

“Bart,” Her voice sounds muffled by the pillow. “Can you check on Apollo?”

In the corner of the Allen bunk, Bart can see the brightness of the toddler’s eyes, already up and alert.

“Check his nose, will you?” She mutters, while Bart stumbles off of the bottom bunk and heads to the cot hastily assembled in the corner.

Apollo has his mother’s green eyes, eyes like Bart does, but his brown hair springs in curls. At three, he’s bubbly, and bright, with a lisp so strong he can’t say Bart’s name properly. Bart hoists the baby up into his arms, grinning as he wraps his arms around his neck. Apollo clings to him in the grainy light, and with the corner of his sleeve, wipes his runny nose, and the gleam off sweat from his forehead.

“Is he okay?” Alice is sitting up, concern written all over her face. It stops Bart’s heart, to see her like this, with anxiety so ingrained in her.

“Yeah, he’s alright Alice,” Bart bounces on his heels, swaying gently. “Sweaty, but he’s okay.”

She bites the bottom of her lip, looking down from above. Alice always looks so haggard now, the lines deeper on her face, more gaunt. Everyone reacted differently to the left corridor collapsing, when the steel suspensions fell to the rusted foundations, and the cold earth brought the cave in. And with the loss of the corridor was the loss of a quarter of the generators, and Artemis, and Aunt Dawn, and others left in their dwindling population were crushed into the earth.

Everyone reacts differently. Wally threw himself back into the rush and grind of taking down the Reach, and Alice, with only Apollo left, and his shallow breathing, his runny nose, did the same.

(And Bart just keeps running. Tries to hold to the ground, even when it shifts, even when it moves, even when there’s no ground to hold onto anymore.)

“Henry says we should be able to get the results of the echo this time.” Alice says quietly, plucking with a stray thread from her blanket. “Tim got it back working. Says we can drop down whenever.”

Bart swallows, holding Apollo just a fraction tighter. Bart is eleven years old, has never felt the sun on his face, but knows fear when it comes stalking around the corner. “Do you want me to go with you? Moral support? Stop Apollo from spitting up on Henry?”

A ghost of a smile appears on her lips, shy and shallow, barely even there. She shakes her head. “No, dad says he’ll be there. I don’t wanna drag you into it.”

Bart feels the protest rise in his throat, almost like second nature. “It’s not dragging me into it, we’re family!”

“I know Bart.” She says, brushing blonde hair out of her face. “But if it’s bad news I don’t want you there.”

(When Bart was really little, and Wally was too old, he’d meet Alice at the end of the tunnel waiting in the dark for him, the gold of her goggles glinting against the dirt walls and the dirt floor and the underearth all around them.

“Just stick with me kid.” She’d laugh, pinch his left cheek. “You n’ me are golden.”)

(And here they were, years later, waning on and on and on.)

“I want to be there.” He hears his voice crack, as the baby babbles on his hip, as Apollo plays with the hair at the nape of his neck, as around them, the life the League tried to make crumbles and crumbles and crumbles around them. 

(Her childhood got curtailed when the Reach became gentle ambassadors and then tyrants. Bart can yearn for the things he’s missed out, but Alice, like Jai, like Lian, and Nessie, and Dean-Harper; all they can do is remember.)

“You’re a kid Bart, not a superhero.” She jumps off the bunk bed, taking a minute to look at Apollo, wipe his nose for him, coo at how his smile brightens when he sees his mother. Without saying anything, Bart passes the baby to her, and feels his heart break. “Apollo’s scan isn’t something you need to be there for.” 

With that, the metal door slides open, and Bart’s left in the empty Allen bunk, where Aunt Dawn used to sleep, where Grandma used to sit and read to him, where his mother would hold him too tightly and his father was alive, and there, and real, not just another dead superhero caught by the Reach.

(Living in the Cave, under the ground, has taught Bart more about the harsh realities of life, and sometimes it comes in the form of losing all of the family, and sometimes in the form of a three year old boy’s failing body.)

-

The wailing sirens in the Cave mean two things; someone is leaving, or someone is coming in.

Dean-Harper roams past his bedroom, poking his head in. His hair is streaked with grey, blue eyes bright, despite the low lighting at the hour of day. The energy-saving measures the League follow are crucial for keeping the whole place spinning, but it meant Bart spent more of his day in the dark, and keeping his goggles strapped to his head to stop himself from squinting all the time. But for the first time in weeks, Dean-Harper looks more alert, excited even, as opposed to trailing around the computers and watching the world tick on.

“Hey,” He grins, pulling the break on his chair. “Nessie’s back.”

(Cheshire going in and out of the Cave isn’t new, but coming back with good news is another thing entirely.)

When Bart gets to the mission room, he expects the room to be fuller, with the League all bundled together, squishing into the sides of the mountain. But when he arrives, the emptiness is felt. Wally sits on the far side of the room, folding and unfolding his hands, looking at the image on the screen. Jai, without Henry sits next to his father, their heads bent together. The Nguyen-Harper family stay huddled together, Dick Grayson leaning on his cane, Barbara glued to the tablet on her lap. For the few that are here, the fight isn’t over, still burning bright under the ground, as the Reach empire churns above them.

“Glad we’re all here.” Nessie, sharply, smiles at them, and the despair is palpable.

“Wait, should Bart be here?” Jai asks, gesturing to him in the corner.

“I’m not a baby!” He scoffs, lining up with the wall.

“Bart,” Wally says, crossing the space between them. In three years, the lines on his face have only deepened, gotten harsher, ringed around his eyes. It’s aging, Bart knows that, and everyone will age and grow old someday, but the years seem to pile on more and more whenever he sees Wally. Whatever internal struggle Wally’s battling, he loses, with the way his eyes lose their hard, steel look. “Just… sit and listen.”

Bart smiles toothily, zipping his lips shut with his fingers, but there’s no heart in it. “Aye, aye, sir.”

It cracks a smile out of Wally, small, barely there, like Alice’s. “Go sit down.”

“Can I start?” Nessie prods, some of her body cam images splayed across the screens.

“We’ve been waiting enough, haven’t we?” Lian snides.

With a flare of her nostrils, Nessie begins, and for a split second, Bart wishes he was back in his room, protected from the adult world, with its small meetings, with the emptiness flooding the room, and the unyielding assault of horror and terror coming from the outside world in.

(How could anyone stand it? No wonder why no one showed up.)

“... he’s a high-ranking Reach official. Named Neutron, real name Nathanial Tyron.”

Bart’s mind stirs at the name, as if he’s heard it before. Beside him, Wally’s face is unbreakable, even has he leans back. “He’s the one that killed Uncle Barry.”

The face on the screen is old, scarred, no hair or eyebrows, just an orange jumpsuit with an inhibitor collar. He looks like a man, a little younger than Wally, enslaved to the Reach, like everyone else.

(Barry Allen died before Bart was born, before Aunt Dawn and dad was born, before the Reach were even known to mankind.)

Nessie nods, crossing her arms. “Since he’s retired, he got a big whole ‘Reach parade’ to celebrate him. But then he got dumped in the camp I was hiding in.”

“What a retirement plan.” Dick mutters under his breath.

“Bet he didn’t even have dental.” Wally says, nudging him. Only Bart laughs, but it rings hollow.

“Say what you want about him, but he’s the best source I have right now. And,” Nessie takes a breath, reaching out to squeeze her wife’s hand. “He wants to help us.”

The silence is choking, forcing all of the air out of the room. To Bart’s right, Jai runs his hand through his hair, while Wally balls his fists, and Bart feels like he belongs somewhere in that anger. Like his grandfather’s murderer means something to him, like the way it does for Wally, and Jai.

(Bart’s the last remaining vessel for Aunt Dawn, and dad, and Grandma Iris’ vengeance, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.)

“I think we should hear him out.” Jai says, with such conviction that reminds Bart so much of Artemis. “Look, I’m married to a Reach defector, I think I know what we’re dealing with.”

“Henry did some shady things in hospitals with organ harvesting, Neutron is a domestic terrorist.” Dick states, dryly, as if he’s speaking on behalf of someone else.

“Neutron said that he wasn’t a willing participant to the Reach Empire.” Tabitha, with her big brown eyes wide and open. Tabitha has a low level metagene with psychic components, and it seems to show, with her old eyes, and wary smile. Her french accent is lilting, almost raw when she speaks, and the marks from her inhibitor collar never seemed to fade away. “He wants to right his wrongs, with our help.”

“Some wrongs are-”

“What’s his plan?” Wally speaks. Out of everyone in the room, the only one that knew Barry, truly knew Barry, was Wally West, the man who blew himself up in his garden shed just to be his sidekick. Wally sees the curious glances, from Karen and Mel in the far corner, from Dean-Harper, Jade and Roy. “We should at least hear him out.”

“His plans not exactly… foul-proof.” Nessie says, tentatively.

“Well what is it?” Tim asks. Tim Drake, at some point, was an engineer that went to space and beyond, master tactician for the League. Now he keeps the generators ticking, like a lame magic trick keeping them all alive.

“Time-travel.” When no one reacts, Nessie sighs, pushing her black hair behind her shoulders. “He has a theory that our timeline went to shit, pardon my French, when he killed the Flash.”

Mel furrows his brow. “But time-travel is impossible.”

Barbara rubs her face with a heavy sigh, her shoulders folding in. “We’ve always had to accept that the Reach is insanely more advanced, technology-wise, than us. It’s crazy not to think that they’d hacked time travel before we figured out how to fly a plane to bypass their radars..”

“So, he wants someone to go to the future, stop… himself? From killing Uncle Barry, to stop the Reach from invading earth?” Wally pieces it together, explaining it slowly.

“Chaos theory.” Bart finds himself quipping, and all the eyes in the room swivels to him. He shrinks under their stares. “Y’know, butterfly flaps its wings, starts an avalanche somewhere else. Only instead of a butterfly its, the death of the Flash..”

“And instead of an avalanche, it's enslavement of mankind.” Wally finishes, and his smile is anxious.

“The real question is, are we gonna believe him?” Dick asks.

And not even Bart has an answer for that.

-

When Apollo falls asleep, it’s just Alice and Bart in the room. She reads the same books and he watches reruns of the same movies on the tablet Aunt Dawn gave him when he’d follow her around the bunker. Slowly, she descends down the bed, until she’s at the foot of Bart’s, her green eyes red rimmed.

“So… his heart scan came back clear. He’s not in heart failure or anything.” Instantly, it’s like a weight is lifted, pulled up from the most exhausted place within him. He’s tired of bad news, sad news, days ending in the dark of the bunker. Alice doesn’t look at him. For weeks, Apollo was sluggish, tired, excessive sweating and sniffing, and avoiding eating what little rations he could get.

“That’s… good right?” He asks, shifting around on the bed, until he’s sitting directly across from her.

She doesn’t say anything for a few moments, going over and over in her head. Bart’s used to adults hesitating before talking to him, thinking before speaking, trying to carefully put together the most child-friendly answer they can think of. “Did you know,” She starts, with a small smile. “That the Reach gives its workers some high powered energy drink to keep them biologically at their best? It’s true, Nessie told me.”

“Like Reach the drink?” Bart knows Wally mentioned it a few times, how he was one of the first scientists to actually look into it, what was in it, pull apart its components and find out it was much more sinister than strawberry-mango.

“Sort of. More like the smoothie you have, to kill your metabolism. Only it keeps you strong. Ready to take on anything.”

It makes him more confused, the brightness in her face. “Alice, is everything okay?”

“Bart,” She pauses, thinking for words, always looking for the right thing to say. “He still isn’t any better. See, you… when you were born things were different, a different system completely. People were in and out of the Cave from everywhere in the world. And we actually had made some advances on fighting back. We were an actual, legitimate threat, part of a network across the country.” A smile breaks through, thinking of all those years ago. “Life was different. It was a better world, one Don, and Meloni thought was still one worth bringing a child into.”

Her voice drops to a whisper, deathly silent in the still air. “This isn’t living, Bart. I don’t want my baby to die in this cave, not when the Reach can help him. Help us.”

“Alice-” They’re alive, of course, but Bart can hardly say he’s living, and the dead eyed stare of Alice shows she feels the same.

But before he can say anything, Apollo wails loudly, and Alice is across the room in a flash.

-

The days tick on and on, as some tentative exploration of Nathaniel Tyron from a coded communication line starts gaining traction. Dean-Harper never leaves the control room, Lian and Nessie advancing outside more and more, Wally working on the garbled notes Nathaniel wires through, trying to make time travel possible, to send someone, or people to the future, and try and stop the world from falling apart.

“Who’re you gonna send?” Bart asks one night. He’s sitting on Wally’s desk, his knees tucked up as he drinks his metabolism smoothie, trying to keep the twists in his stomach quiet.

Wally looks up from the notes, and the big magnifying glass he has in front of his eyes. “Huh?”

“Y’know?” Bart cocks his head. “This mission to the past? Who’s gonna go.”

“I don’t know that Bart, who knows yet. It’s still away-aways for now.”

Bart nods slowly, thinking over his words.

(Last night, Bart had an insane, crazy, whacky, weird, strange daydream, where he strapped Apollo to his chest and arrived in the past, where vitamins seemed to grow on trees, and immune systems were handed out like presents. That bubble burst, when he remembered Nessie’s years of experience in reconnaissance, and the fact that Lian was born months before the Reach invaded. It was nice, for a second, to imagine a life where he could go to and fro into the past, and live outside for once, and keep babies happy and healthy and alive.)

“What about Alice?” He says, avoiding Wally’s curious green eyes.

“What about Alice.” Wally mumbles, flipping a sheet over.

“What if she went back.”

“Bart,” Wally shifts in his chair, turning to face them. He does that thing, where he waits to put his words together, careful, always careful. “It’s not gonna be a lottery. The mission is too dangerous to send  _ anyone  _ into the past. Nathaniel might be playing us, ready to expose us to the Reach to get out of his internment. It’s too early to start thinking about this when we don’t even have a vessel.”

It shuts Bart down for a second, crushing his grand plan to stop Alice from turning herself in. If he wants, if he wanted, he could tell Wally what Alice told him, but Bart can see the waves of stress heaving on his shoulders, under his brow, in his clicking joints. Bart’s never seen misfortune so blatant on Wally’s face, and it clings to him.

Wally must notice his downcast look, and slides a sheet over to him. There’s a warmth in his eyes, something almost like hope, that Bart can’t hide from. “Hey Bart?”

“Yeah?”

“Wanna know how time-travel works?”

-

“Bart,” Alice says, shaking him on the shoulder. “Bart,” She tries again, but this time he rouses, leaning up on his elbow to see her. “Good, you’re up.”

“Alice? Is Apollo alright?” She’s in her red and yellow suit, the green bomber jacket covering up the lightning bolt across her chest. In a backpack at her feet, Apollo looks blearily up at him, his face shining in the dim light. “Alice, you’re not-”

Alice sees the realisation dawn, responding to his panic with a sweet smile, and hands on his shoulders. “It’s okay Bart.”

“No it’s not-”

“It’s okay,” She says again, and her hands find his wrists, stopping him from thrashing away from her. “Bart, stop that it’s okay--It’s okay, it’s  _ alright _ .” Alice sounds soothing, like she’s talking to Apollo, trying to calm a wailing baby down. Bart doesn’t scream and cry and shout the way Apollo would, but he feels the tears prick at his eyes, and the burn building up in his throat.

“What about Wally?” He asks first, before himself, before Jai. “What about your dad?”

Her smile doesn’t falter, but her eyes crease, all of her heartbreak spilling out of her green irises. “I just came to say goodbye Bart.” She pulls her hands off of his wrists, folding them neatly together. “Dad and Jai, and everyone knows too. I’ve already said what I’ve had to say.”

“And he’s okay, they’re okay with where you’re going?”

Alice looks down at her hands, and Bart can see for the first time in years, they’re not shaking. Her smile is fraught, absurdly calm. “They are, Bart, I promise. They understand that… parents make sacrifices for their children. It’s just how life has always been.”

(Bart has hazy memories of his father, hazy memories of a red haired man in a red and gold suit. Bart knows his mother, knows her smile and laugh and voice, knows how much she loved him, even when it hurt.)

“I do need your help Bart.” Alice says precariously. “I need you to close the hatch, manually. I’ll close it on one side, and you can close it on the other.”

“What about the control room?”

Alice’s laugh is dry. “That would set off the alarm system.”

He licks his lips, trying to wrap his head around it. Everytime Nessie so much as stepped outside the Cave, the entire place seemed cloaked in grief, premature mourning. When Mom left, it was a solemn, sad affair, but he remembers Jade and Roy on one side of the door, and Wally on the other. He doesn’t remember the blaring alarms.

“If I don’t go now, I’ll never leave.”

_ I don’t want to bury my baby down here. _

With a quick nod, Bart follows her out of the room, slapping his goggles on. Alice wears her’s too, as they sneak around the bunker, in the same pattern Bart has done over and over again, finding comfort in the dark.

They stalk deeper into the earth, Bart keeping his hand on the cool wall. For the slightest second, Bart feels like he’s a kid again, getting ready to step outside into the clouded light, and feel it kiss their faces.

(“I miss the grass.” She said every time, because Bart was one of the few people in the bunker who has never seen grass, or a whole lot of the sun, or flowers that bloom brightly and don’t just die after sprouting. “Have I mentioned that before?” It made him giggle, as the world went red in front of the lenses. The world is still red, and Bart hasn’t seen the grass yet.)

The glowing green panel greets him at the hatch, tender against his hammering heart. Without hesitation, Alice types in her designation, and doesn’t flinch when the shaft opens. In another time, Bart would have looked up and saw stars, hundreds and thousands of miles away, and he thinks about how the Reach managed to snuff them out.

“If you see mom,” Bart starts, the night wind blowing at his fringe. Alice has her mother’s height, looking down at him, with all of the pity in the world. “Will you, um, tell her, that-”

“I will.” Alice stops him, pulling him into a hug. Tell her  _ I love her.  _ Tell her  _ I’m sorry. _ Tell her  _ I miss her _ . Tell her  _ I know why she left.  _ What Bart really wants to say, to Alice’s face, is that he knows why she’s leaving too.

“Goodbye, Apollo.” Bart kisses his head softly, stroking his cheek. Bart can’t do anything but believe in the hope that the Reach will give him a better future than the League.

Bart watches as she climbs out of the cave, watches as her head disappears. Listens to the tell-tale click of the hatch locking, just as the tunnel fills with wind and Wally’s standing next to him.

“Alice!”

Alice had never lied to him before. Not before now.

“She’s too fast for me to catch her.” Wally says, and Bart feels the world fracture under him.

  
  


**past ii: you have to slow down and breathe one breath at a time**

  
  


Of all the rooms in the Cave, the one that’s most familiar is the grotto.

It’s surreal to stand on the small footbridge. In Bart’s time, the grotto is an abundance of bright lights, holograms linked together, a chain of fallen heroes. In the past, there’s less, much less statues, and the grotto is still a place for memorial, not a burial ground.

Jaime stands and stares wistfully at Ted Kord, as if he’s forcing himself to look and look and look.

(Bart has to ask himself how many times he’s done that for Batman, and the Flash, and Aquaman, and Wonder Woman, Superman, the Green Lanterns, and Aqualad, and Wonder Girl, Miss Martian, Beast Boy, the Robins, Batgirl. Sometimes living in the past feels like he’s living with the dead.)

“For someone who never met Ted Kord, you spend an awful amount of time staring at him.” Bart quips, elbowing Jaime gently.

“Nightwing says self-doubt and confusion is normal for superheroes.” Jaime looks him up and down, with mirth in his eyes as opposed to irritation. “Maybe you should get some.”

Bart’s stomach flips, for just a split second, and he has to bark down the feeling before he starts to blush. “Well hermano, not my fault my folks in the future have instilled a safe amount of security in myself. And besides, I’m confused all the time.”

Jaime cocks his head, staring intently. “How so?”

Bart looks back at him, eyes widening for the briefest of seconds. There wasn’t really anyone, anywhere, in the future, to feel this way about. Bart’s experiencing his first crush with the grace of a wounded fawn, stumbling into love the same way he crashes after running too fast.

He tries to push it away for when it blows up in his face. He doesn’t want to fail his mission because Jaime Reyes, who might be Blue Beetle someday, who could one day lead the invasion of Earth, who would maybe go on and do all those terrible things, is a nice teenager, afraid of all of the capabilities the beetle gives him, a few years older than Bart, who’d probably never see him in that light.

Bart knows that this could jeopardize everything.

(But he falls anyway.)

“Ese?” Jaime prods, bumping his side again. “You were saying?”

“Right!” Bart snaps back to him, pulling on his widest smile. He claps his hand on Jaime’s shoulder, shaking him roughly. “Got so confused in my confusion I forgot how to speak.”

“See, you’re getting the hang of the superhero self-doubt already!”

“That’s the past for you!” 

-

After the second week of April, Bart doesn’t think he’s ever been more stressed in his life. Getting abducted by the same man Bart would visit biweekly down in the memorial grotto, forty years in the future, watching as Kaldur’ahm flickered dimly, was a knock to his confidence, he had to say. 

Then, he crept around a Reach factory with the future-Reach dictator, and Arsenal, who is but also isn’t Lian, Nessie and Dean-Harper’s biological father, and Tim, who is solidly the smartest and coolest teenager Bart has ever met. After getting mission clearance, after getting his mind swiped by Miss Martian and Martian Manhunter back in March, Nightwing seemed to plunge him into missions.

“Been a while since we had a speedster on the team.” Nightwing says, his tone almost bitter, creeping around the edges of his words.

He does patrols with Barry, gets lost in Central City every third, fifth and seventh nights of the week, awkwardly interacts with the family he’s never met, and tries, desperately tries to live his life in the past, as if his life in the future is better than this.

Connecting with Barry is it’s own privilege, challenge and burden, all at once. Barry Allen was the grandfather who died before his own children were born, the second Flash with the ghost in the Grotto. After patrols, Barry takes him back to his and Iris’ house and he goes on and on and on about his fighting stories, tales Aunt Dawn, Grandma Iris, Dad and Wally had already told him.

“... of course then Captain Cold decided to-”

“Build an ice fort around the park, but you ran the entire perimeter in fifteen seconds with your hand on the wall, melting it away with friction.” Bart finishes, as Barry’s jaw goes slack. “C’mon grandpa, you really think you haven’t told me this yourself?”

It’s easier, when he acts like this, to imagine an aged Barry Allen living with him, old, older than Wally, who nags neighborhood children and waters his lawn and lives beyond the age of thirty seven.

“Say, Bart, can I nitpick for a second?” Barry asks, almost embarrassed. Behind him, Iris smiles, as if this is a conversation she knows is coming. For a hairsbreadth, Bart thinks they’re on to him, and they know, just  _ know,  _ that he’s been lying to them the whole time. 

“You need to work on your breaking.” Barry says instead, and that wave of panic is replaced by a strange, mangled mixture of offense. For the first time in thirteen years, Bart can go, and be, as fast as he likes, because running around the dirt track at top speed would set off a whole hoard of scanners and sensors and sonors. When he runs here, right in the past, in the Impulse costume while he dodges baddies and bullets and saves Central City, there’s no limit to where he can go, until he reaches this brightness on the end of time, and he ends up on his face when he tries to extract himself from it.

“Wait, what?” He feigns confusion.

Barry rubs the back of his neck. “I’m sorry Bart, I figured you’d want me to tell you about it so you could improve.”

“Hey, I was trained by the best of the best speedsters in the world!”  _ The only speedsters in the world. _

“Don’t worry, Wally’s offered to help you out.” Iris smiles at him again, dragging up all of the awkward grief he’s had to bury down. 

“Doesn’t Wally hate me?” Bart says it before he can think. Iris stops smiling, instead clasps her hands together, running her mouth into a hard line.

“Wally’s going through a lot of pain right now, Bart, you know that, right?”

(It’s easier to sound like a whiny brat, who doesn’t understand grief, or loss, than let it slip for one second, that the future is a nightmare, and everyone he loves and knows is dead.)

“Right, sorry… I just didn’t think about what I said.” Bart retracts, shrinking into himself. “I can’t even imagine what he’s going through.”

Iris leans forward, slipping her hand into his. “Wally has his parents, and us too, and you as well Bart, to help him right now. Maybe helping you with your speed might be good for him.”

“It’ll get him out of the house, too.” Barry notes. Getting his head around Barry is harder than anyone else in the past, because at least, to an extent, Bart knew Iris, and knew Wally, and others like Dick and Mel and Karen, Artemis and Tim and everyone, but Bart only has the idea of Barry to get him through, and that’s much harder to understand.

“Just give it a chance, Bart,” Iris says. “For us?”

The next morning, he’s out in Palo Alto at four am, meeting Wally in the back of a Stanford race track.

“Your breaking really is all over the place.” Wally chides, sitting out in the dewy morning, Brucely tucked between his legs as the wetness clings to his fur.

Bart claps his hands on his hips, letting the fresh morning air fill his lungs. “Well sor-ry Mr West, didn’t realise I was getting feedback just yet.”

“I’m a TA. I literally get paid to do that.”

“Bold to assume I know what that is.” Bart yells back, and kicks his heels into the dirt, starting off around the track, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred times.

“I’m a teaching assistant, in university.” Wally says, once Bart lands on his face, spitting grass and dirty out of his mouth. Wally shakes his head, reaching down to rub his lazy dog between the ears. “Is the future really that much of a mess?”

He bites down the nervous laughter. “Uh, hello, we have AIs with their own favourite colors. We don’t need human ‘teaching assistants’.”

Wally shrugs, and Bart’s panic deflates when Wally doesn’t question him. “I see your point.” The only ones really, really interested in future technology are Karen, Tim, Barbara and Dick, and lying on the fly is hard when they expect him to have hundreds of anecdotal evidence with devices he’s making up.

(“Think Japanese bidet-toilet but it’s for your whole body.”

“That isn’t exactly logically sound.” Tim frowned. “In fact, isn’t that just a shower?”

“It’s the future babey, it’s not about logic!”)

Bart tries again, accelerates from one end of the field to the other, and reaches that hot white brush of speed until he’s on his face again, thrashing in the frozen dirt. He’s wearing special boots that keep him from running giant craters into the earth, only the best for a speedster time traveller, courtesy of WayneTech’s finest, but it’s strange, without the weight of his shoes to ground him on the dirt path. Every time he falls, it feels like he’ll open his eyes to a field of ash and dust, with the track there to open for him.

“This is never gonna work.” Bart sighs in defeat. He won’t admit why it’s so hard to stop and start at speeds wildly different to what he’s allowed to go past. Because limits always bring questions, like why, and how, and they’re answers Bart can’t keep deflecting forever.

(The only person he’s told, to an extent, is Jaime, who has this weird and morbid curiosity of what life under the Reach is like. Bart tries to be warm about it.

“Well, my hermano, let’s just say there’s not a lot of benefits.”

“Like what?”

“Well, firstly, they don’t even have dental.”

“They don’t even have dental.” Jaime tuts.)

“Here.” Wally is sitting next to him all of a sudden, Brucely trailing after him, the dog’s breath hot on Bart’s face. Wally hands him a quarter, shiny in the early morning darkness, even if the red sun is slowly creeping into the sky. It’s foregin to hold, purely because physical money died in 2030, the cheapest way to ring in a new decade, in Bart’s opinion, but it’s warm, from Wally’s coat and hands.

“What’s this for?”

Wally grins, like the lazy, strained smile Bart’s known all of his life, a faraway cry from the pictures in Jay and Joan’s, in Iris and Barry’s, of Wally West smiling so wide his eyes were squeezed shut. “They say the Flash could stop on a dime at his top speed, back when Jay wore the suit.” He flicks the quarter with his thumb, sending it spinning into the air, landing on the grass next to Bart’s nose. “Try it. It takes practice, but you’ve been running longer than I have, you’ll learn quickly.”

“Grandma says you used to look like a baby horse when you tried to control your speed.” Bart learned to shake his molecules before he could turn over on his back, or so Alice says. Wally wasn’t as fast as him, and then Alice and Jai were even slower than Wally, and Bart didn’t know if Apollo even had a metagene, much less the ability to run. “Is that true?”

Wally laughs, sounding like a high snicker. He shakes his head, chuckling into the blue sky. “Something like that. However, I blew myself up in my garden shed, you were born like that.” For a split second, there’s a wave of animosity, hulking under his green eyes, right in the corner of his snarl.

Wally-in-the-past still hates him, and thinks he’s a nuisance, and hates that he runs faster than him, but he is also twenty years old, grieving someone that’s not supposed to happen for another forty years, with a pile of problems that only someone living in 2016 can have.

Bart can excuse it, because spending time with Wally is still better than never seeing him at all.

-

Jaime deciding to spend all of his free time with Green and Black Beetle stings, admittedly, before the panic sets in. Bart laps Colorado to burn off the stress, following the square state and all of its fault lines, before running back to Joan and Jay’s. What’s nice about the past is how wide everything is. Bart’s ran places to he thought were smoldering ash, leftovers when the Reach came in and gutted the planet for resources. 

The plan felt easier, back in January, where he wasn’t alone, and stopping Neutron from killing the Flash was the only thing he had to do.

There was no Green Beetle, no Black Beetle, no accelerated Reach host working with the UN. History is slipping through his hands like sand, and he can’t hold on much longer.

His phone buzzing in his pocket pulls him out of his thoughts, an unknown number flashing across his screen.

“Hey, Bart.” Wally drawls, a strange edge to his voice. “Aunt Iris says your patrol got canceled so I was wondering if you maybe wanted to Palo Alto?” He waits a few seconds, then starts again. “I just finished up finals today, I’ve ordered a shit-tonne of food, if you-”

“Yes,” Bart rasps, already out of the door. “I’ll be there in like ten minutes! Don’t eat everything!”

The Palo Alto apartment is messier than Bart remembers it being, but this time it’s from stress and working with finals and studying, not grief.

“You still sleep on the sofa?” Bart asks, keeping his eyes firmly on the pizza boxes stacked on the kitchen table.

“It doesn’t feel right I guess.” Wally shrugs, and passes Bart a can. “My lease is up at the end of July, and I’ve found somewhere that’s a bit cheaper.”

“ _ Oooh!  _ Bachelor pad!” Bart exclaims, reaching for a high five. For a split second, Wally’s eyes widen, and Bart’s head becomes inflamed with how utterly stupid and inconsiderate and  _ awful _ he can be-

“I was thinking more like a personal BatCave, but you have the right idea.” Wally’s grin is weightless. He slides a box to Bart, almost like an olive branch, pushing it into his hands.

(Sometimes, Bart has to wonder how much of this is an act and how much of it is real. How loose it feels, to just speak, and not worry about what anyone else has to say. To hear his own voice be louder than everyone else’s and not care about the consequences.)

But settling in next to Wally with a plate of food and watching bad movies on the television dregs an old memory up, from the deepest, darkest recesses of his mind, the place he hasn’t touched since he left. It’s a scene like this one, but only there Wally is forty nine, someone’s father, someone’s husband, and Bart is seven, someone’s son, no one’s great-grandson. For the longest time back then, Bart thought that was all they would be.

Here Wally is a student, with a dead girlfriend, and Bart doesn’t know what will happen to Alice and Jai, and if they’ll even exist here. Here Wally has a future that forks away from being a superhero, and maybe Wally the Scientist will do more for the world than Wally the Flash, when the Reach Invasion is stopped. Here Wally has a different life ahead of him, Bart realises for the first time, and he can’t help but fear that it’s a life without him.

After a dreadful marathon, Wally gives him a stack of blankets and pillows, gives him the floor, while Brucely pads into the master bedroom and Wally doesn’t stop him. Wally tucks himself into the couch, reminding Bart of the early days in the Allen room, after mom went into Reach custody, when Bart slept in mom’s old bunk and Wally slept on his. He could always tell when Wally was awake or asleep based on his breathing, and he still can now, with a sudden sharpness behind his eyes.

“Can I ask something kind of weird?” Wally says into the darkness.

“Uh, sure, yeah.” Bart rubs his eyes, trying to keep the sadness out of his voice. “Bare in mind of the spoiler warning, I can’t go blabbering about lotto numbers or whatever.”

Wally’s hand swats his chest from above. “I know that, brat.” He heaves, then settles in deeper into the couch. “Can I ask about… my life?”

“Uh, your life?”

“Like,” Wally stops, and from the floor Bart can see him rotating his wrists while he thinks. “You’re Aunt Iris and Uncle Barry’s grandson, right? You’re gonna be the boy twin’s son, right?”

“I’m not telling you his name or birthday, if that’s what you’re asking-”

“I’m asking if I have kids, okay?” With an indignant huff, Wally crosses his arms. Bart waits a few minutes, to see if he’ll continue. “Be as vague as possible, I just wanna ask, I guess, if I’m happy, in the future, if that makes sense.”

Bart chokes for a second, tears coming to his eyes at the gentleness in Wally’s voice, how soft it sounds. Of everyone Bart knew in the future that deserved a happy future, it was always Wally. It always was, because if he didn’t, Bart wouldn’t be in the past, sleeping on the floor, doing everything he could to stop the Invasion.

“You have an average amount of kids.” Bart says. His tongue feels heavy.

“So, like a 2.5 situation?” He can hear the smile in Wally’s voice.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that.” Bart wipes his face, thinking of Alice and Jai’s green eyes, the ones they got from their father, along with his heart and soul and courage. “They’re nice by the way.” He swallows thickly, letting out a shaky laugh. “I miss them a lot--y’know, because they live in the future!”

Wally sighs, a long, drawn out dreamy one, full of heavy exhaustion. “I can’t wait to meet them.”

“What I can tell you,” Bart starts, feeling the salt on his lips, down his chin and neck. “Is that you’ll have a grandson someday.”

“Will he come to the future like you? Annoy the shit out of me for a vacation?”

He laughs again, this time with more force. “I’m sure by the time he’s thirteen they’ll figure out this ‘returning to the future’ malarkey.”

“I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad you stayed.” Wally says, and Bart’s whole chest blooms.

**present ii: through the desert (repenting)**

Being around Wally sometimes is a bit suffocating. Like there’s never enough room for everyone’s grief, never enough air in the room for everyone.

The worst part about it is that no one expected it to be so hard. How guilty everyone feels that it’s so frustrating to talk to him, or be with him, or try and knit him back into their lives like when he was gone, or before he was gone.

(But mostly, everyone was ashamed, because Wally died, and meanwhile the world went on.)

“Donny and Dawn are still ‘playing strange’ with people they don’t know.” Iris says every time he comes over, when the twins shuffle and shift around him. For a moment, Iris’ face falls, watching the muscle in Wally’s jaw twitch. “Wally… you know that’s-”

“I know, Aunt Iris.” Wally says tiredly, waving her off.

Sometimes watching everyone interact with him is like watching a trainwreck. Bart can’t look away.

He tries, at least, to stay normal around him. Bart strives to become so intolerable around him that he’ll never have to see him. Wally left only vaguely liking him and Bart wants to keep it that way. 

(Because the truth is, Bart missed Wally more than anything, more than anyone else in the entire world. And holding him at a distance is the only way he’ll stop feeling guilty about letting him die again.)

Some days, Bart wants to tip the tension over the edge, push all the air out of the room and make everyone accept what’s going on. Wally’s back, but not it’s not what they thought it would be like. It’s easier to act like nothing has changed, easier to pretend the trees are still full of leaves, even when the snow falls.

Jaime lets him sneak into his house if he promises not to set off the sprinklers. There’s always a bed laid out for him when he has a family dinner, somewhere to go after spending an evening watching Wally’s parents gape, and cry, and gape some more at their still-living son. It means Bart doesn’t have to spend hours in Joan and Jay’s living room in silence, while Wally only talks to Artemis and Artemis doesn’t talk to any of them. It’s worse when the twins were there, because Wally tries so hard─the hardest, really─with them, but Donny and Dawn are babies and don’t understand resurrection.

“Family’s are hard bro.” Jaime says, a type of comfort Bart could accept.

It’s fine, until Wally remembers he can run, and then Wally realises he can run fast.

Bart’s there to see him break through his old barriers, as the lightning crackles and fills the world with bright light, raining from above. It’s breathtaking and beautiful, and it reminds Bart of all the reasons why he loves to run, 

“You must be faster than Grandpa! That’s like, wickedly crash man, absolutely crazy, crash and-”

He knows it’s the wrong thing to say, he can tell by the panic in Wally’s eyes, how the air is rife with ozone and energy but he doesn’t know what the right thing is either.

The second time he sees Wally sprint across the desert and back in less than three minutes, Bart gets this disgusting surge, deep in his gut. Wally is fast, in a flashy way. But he doesn’t trip, he makes every corner, leaves the sand floating in the air after him, glinting in the dying sun, rather than forcing a trail of destruction everywhere he goes.

(When Bart runs, it’s like he’s borrowing power, harnessing it and using it and taking it for granted. Wally treats it as a gift, something he had to earn and something he had to gain the trust of.)

It’s jealousy, he realises, while he pays more attention to the people removing Wally’s hologram from the memorial garden than M’gann giving the mission brief. Some awful, manged, mutilated jealousy that comes from the fact that Wally survived death and ended up faster than him.

(It just makes the guilt feel worse.)

Only Bart could be jealous of something like that.

(It comes from the fear that the team won’t need him anymore, and he’ll be put aside and they won’t need him anymore. He’ll never find a purpose again and they won’t need him anymore.)

“They’re starting these running tests.” Wally says, awkwardly, at one of the better family dinners, the first one where Bart fights the urge to run back to El Paso.

“Oh yeah! Ed was saying something about that!” Bart straightens up, popping his head up on the back of the couch. Ed went on for about twenty minutes about how if Wall’s new powers included a burst of speed and elemental powers, would everyone else get a power up.

(“Maybe I could even time-travel! Like you did!” Ed had yelled, sitting up on his knees and leaning over Bart. He had to push him back onto the couch.

“Hey! There’s only one time traveller in the League and it’s me!” Bart had sounded annoyed, but he didn’t mind it. Sometimes it was nice to be reminded that he wasn’t from there, because it somehow validated all of the memories and baggage he’d brought into the past with him. It helped him remember that all of that stuff happened, and it wasn’t just him that knew about it.)

(Jaime didn’t like to talk about it.)

“Would you want to come with me?” Wally asks, suddenly unsure. “Check out all the weird gadgets? Maybe come for the run?”

Bart goes along, with everyone else, to watch the first test end in flames. Wally conjures a trail of lightning that ends up setting fire to the treadmill, and the endless room has an end all of a sudden, and smoke and smog and water raining from above. The Scientists employed by the Justice League have a calculated and precise edge to them, that sometimes comes across as uncaring.

And that’s the last thing Wally needs right now.

He finds Wally crouching into a ball in the cargo hold, away from the open view of the world from the Watchtower. It must be so disorienting, he notes, to die, and come back, and have to remember that the world is still turning.

“I fought Uncle Barry here, once.” Wally says, his voice carrying across the room. “He’d been possessed.”

(Bart was seven when Wally told him about it, how he’d doubted himself every step of the battle. He said he’d clung to the knowledge that despite the starotech, his uncle was still there, and worth saving.)

(“I knew I couldn’t give up on him, not after everything he’d done for me.”)

“You would’ve been my age when you did that.” Bart says, suddenly sounding very old. “Give or take a few months.”

The silence passes between them in harsh, still beats, the smoke stuck to their clothes and hair, and the nasty burn on Wally’s cheek is already repairing itself, the cells tying themselves together quicker than ever before. Wally looks uncomfortable, as if he can’t adapt to the feeling.

Bart steps forward, shoving his hands in his pockets. Wearing civvies in the Watchtower always came with the strangest thrill, and the slightest trace of feeling like a child, too young to be caught up in all of this. “Do you wanna talk about the test?”

“I got my powers from an explosion before. Figured this would happen.” He replies, keeping his green eyes trained on the metal floor.

“Traditions should always be respected.”

It drags the driest, strangest laugh out of Wally, halfway between a scoff and a chuckle. Bart, in this light and this light only, can see how his aging seemed to halt, with lines on his face that should be deeper, older laughter lines and eye bags and wrinkles in his forehead. He looks fabricated, almost, torn from the past and slapped into the future.

Bart wants to laugh at that too.

“I just wish it would feel  _ normal. _ ” Wally says it with such vitriol Bart can taste the acidity. “I don’t want any tests, I don’t want to know how I came back, I don’t want to know why.” Then, he adds quickly. “And I don’t want to talk to Black Canary about the five steps of grief!”

Bart steps closer, sliding down the metal wall to join him. It’s the most natural thing Bart’s done since the wedding, since he ran to the water’s edge and found the water run back to him.

“Believe me, if you think your sessions with Dinah are bad, you should’ve been there for mine.”

Wally sends him the oddest look, his head cocked to the side. It makes Bart shrink into his neck.

“Did that make you feel better or worse?” He asks, and looks for the answer in Wally’s face.

“To tell you the truth,” Wally sighs, like the whole world is perched on his shoulders. “I have no idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank u so much for reading !!!  
> additonally im an astrology bitch so you can pry gemini sun , cancer moon , leo rising bart out of my cold dead hands (june gemini tho , i feel like he wouldntve told anyone that it was his birthday) . wally is a canon scorpio (or cap according to the comics but ew no hes a scorpio) but id give him an aquarius moon and a leo/sag rising ! as for jaime , i made him a scorpio sun (bday is 6th of november :p) w an aries moon and a cap rising  
> also this was going to be a lot sadder , og plot was alice and apollo going to the reach bc apollo needed a heart transplant (henry vaguely related since has a past w reach organ harvesting) but i realised it was way way /way/ to damn sad .


	3. future iii, past iii, present iii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bart pulls back, eyeing him curiously. “You’re not a homophobe, are you? You’re not a homophobe in the future-”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is dedicated to taakos purely bc we're long lost twins AND they beta'd it . thank u always , for reading it <3 <3 <3

**future iii: how the world could be in spite of the way that it is**

Bart wakes up with a flood of light, his door hissing open, dragging him into the world of the waking. It’s half agonizing for a second, the strain of the low light against his eyes, and how his body seems to ache with exhaustion.

The Cave runs on a reduced power level now, thanks to the failing generators, but even Bart can tell he’s overslept. Bart has never truly lived in the dark, not the way he does now, where the shadows are always pulled tight around the emptiness, stretched thin across the Cave. It was hard at first, to adapt to a narrower life, one where he left the Cave less, one where the lights were always off, one where the cold seemed to sink into his bones and stay there, along with idleness and boredom.

“Hey sleepyhead.” Lian says, stepping closer to his bunk. In the dim light, he can see the red glint of her goggles, to help lessen the strain. “It’s kinda late to be getting up.” She holds up a glass, venturing more on the half-empty than half-full side, offering it with a small smile. “Love from Nessie.”

Bart takes the drink, blinking for a split second. With the rations on his metabolism control and the control on the general rations of the Cave getting stricter, Bart doesn’t think he’s ever slept more in his life. Some days, he’s echoing in and out of consciousness, responding blithely to the world, sinister and small around him.

Lian is her own brand of resolve, how she keeps the Cave running, despite everything. Nessie hasn’t left the Cave since Alice did, and the cramped world below is starting to get to her. Dean-Harper carries on, because it’s the only thing he’s ever known, and they keep pushing for time travel, to take the leap and go.

(There’s this recurring dream he has, where the earth is cold and cool. Unwelcoming, but he feels wanted. There is no sky here. Bart will die in this Cave, he hears himself scream, and this will be the only world he will ever know and he will die here-)

“Hey.” Lian says, grabbing the crook of his elbow. His shirt feels slick, the smoothie running down his arm. Her brows are knitted, her concern sharp across her face. “Are you okay?” He must’ve blacked out 

“I’m alright.” Bart says too quickly. His goggles are wrapped around the post, looking more worn than ever. “What’s the problem?”

Lian eyes the dark stain on his top. “Monitor room, as soon as your ready.”

“Any reason?”

Lian pauses for a moment, just settling at the hollow of the door. Bart has his own room now, no one above or below him, Apollo’s cot still empty in the corner. The Cave is lagging now, crawling to a slow halt, the way everyone knew it would one day, but without the shiny denial to imagine it would never come.

“Mission briefing.”

-

Bart arrives later than he wanted, after changing and downing the rest of his drink. He’s never full these days, only going in and out of states of hunger. It’s a harder sight to see on everyone else. The waning years are suddenly clearer on their faces, as they breathe in the same stale air, confined to their corner of the world.

All of their eyes look to him. The Cave, for the first time, feels too big, like the whole world can fit in here with enough room to spare.

“Should he be here?” Jai asks, much kinder this time than the time before.

No one speaks, and Bart shrinks in the silence. Bart doesn’t yell.

“He’s fine.” Wally says, and the meeting begins.

“We’ve decided to go through with Nathaniel Tryon’s plan.” Nightwing’s voice is pulled taught.

The surprise comes bluntly, the announcement met with less excitement than Bart expected. Instead of joy, a heavy atmosphere settles on them all. There’s the strangest sense of shame on Nightwing’s face, barely concealed as the rest of the room adjust to the room.

Wally’s face is impossibly blank, as if he’s made peace with his desperation, and can’t afford to be ashamed.

Bart can hear the great rushes of air as he bounces his knee up and down, anxiously waiting for the briefing to continue. It’s hard to imagine who they’ve chosen for the mission, out of all of the superheroes they’ve kept underground for all of these years. There’s tension building between Bart’s shoulders as he crunches his arms together, bracing himself for disappointment that will crush him into the earth.

(It never comes.)

“It’s been decided, for a number of factors including age, ability and familial ties to the past, that Bart would be the safest person to go.” Nightwing says, and even if he’s looking at Bart, its as if he’s going right through him, a strange sorrow caught in his tight words.

For Bart, it’s as if the world has been pulled out from under him, the Cave falling through the earth. Bart’s never been on a mission before, hardly even summoned for a briefing, with the vastness of the past open to him, alone and empty, and any relief he feels gets tied to his rising panic.

“Hey, Nightwing, don’t forget about me.” Wally says quickly, sitting up from his table. Loosely, he reaches his hand out to squeeze Bart’s shoulder, a comforting gesture from the days when Bart was barely taller than his hip.

Jai’s eyebrows knit together, a strange expression clouding his features. “Dad, what-”

“He’ll need someone to take care of him.” Wally says, and Bart thinks he imagined his voice breaking as he says it. “We can’t send him alone, Dick, you know that.” With the smallest, most agonised smile, Wally turns to his son, a thousand words caught between them. “You understand, don’t you Jai?”

(It was awful, how the only thing they seemed to share anymore was their grief, losing a wife and mother, a sister and daughter, a nephew and grandson. The fractures in the West family were felt Cave-wide, as if they were everyone’s pain, and no one could escape it.)

Jai is his parents’ son, and knowing his, Bart can see the acceptance there, as hurtful as it might be.

“Should we go on?” Nightwing asks, sending Wally an irritated look.

“I’ll finish it.” Nessie says, taking a deep breath. “The plan will be that in exactly three months from now, Bart and Wally will surrender themselves to the Reach Empire, and spend roughly seven months under what we assume to be maximum security, allowing Nathanial to finish the time machine when the Reach’s attention is on the metahumans.” There’s tears in her eyes. And the strangest amount of sadness to her face when she looks at Bart, as if he’s already gone. “Expected date of departure is late February, according to Nathanial and Wally’s calculations.”

The silence settles again, this time with a renewed ringing in Bart’s ears. He can feel his hands numbly run down the lengths of his thighs, willing them to still, even if his hands won’t stop shaking. There’s no envy, or anger, or anything other than sadness built up in the faces and eyes and actions of people in the briefing room, and for a split second, Bart’s body rejects the quivering joy climbing up his spine. In less than a year he’d be out of the Cave, in the past, with the real sky and sun and stars, with a world without the Reach, and this time he’d be able to beat them, but the sinking knowledge that he’d be leaving everyone here is enough to pull him back to despair.

They close up quickly, with Wally leading Bart out of the room with his hand still on his shoulder. For the barest seconds, Barbra promises the light in the corridors, so everyone can find their way back. The older ones, the early team, don’t need the generators, or the vision goggles, not when they’ve been walking around in the dark here since they were teenagers. Besides, Wally’s old Flash goggles belonged to Don, and their lost with him.

Jai’s room isn’t on the same corridor as Bart’s, a few doors down from the medical wing, where Henry spends his days counting and counting again the dwindling health supplies.

“Well, if it works for you and dad,” Jai says slowly with the barest hint of a smile. Jai has his mother’s face, and all of its kindness and round edges. “If you can do it so can we, and we’ll follow where you lead.”

(Bart pictures a big happy future, where the Cave seems to tumble out of the future and back into the past, unfurling themselves under the sunshine and letting the years underground be shaken from their petals and roots and leaves.)

“Of course,” Bart says, and before he can stop himself he throws himself around Jai’s waist and hugs him tightly. “Of course you will.”

(Jai hates to make promises he can’t keep.)

-

Training starts immediately, with the whole Cave pulling together to get Bart well-versed in life in the past. It takes a village, as the old saying goes, but Bart has always felt like it’s been a group effort on behalf of the Cave to see him raised, living past the age of thirteen. His birthday is awkwardly timed in the middle of June, passing over them like a shadow.

His education takes a backseat, prioritizing fighting, personal history of the League, what the past considers to be recent history, and a swift warning that giving anything away about the state of the future could result in the downfall of everything.

Wally doesn’t need to be told all of this.

In the morning, he starts with Tabby, while Nessie warms up for sparring, and Lian tries to find every inch of information on the political climate of 2016.

“I remember it being bad.” Dean-Harper muses, pushing his glasses up his face.

Lian snorts, sending a sly smile. “That’s not even half of it.”

Tabby is a telepath, a good one, at that, but also the only one the Cave has. She helps him build his mental shields up, better and stronger than before, trying to prepare him for entering a world where metahumans were much more common, and the idea of getting into someone’s brain wasn’t so alien.

“C’mon Bart.” She says, looking down at him. His head rests on her lap, pounding after she got in again, and left his head splintering. Her accent always made her sound so much harsher. “They say Miss Martian was the strongest psychic of all time.”

“It’s not even about stopping her from getting in,” Wally says from the door, sighing. He’s had to relive a lot of his life in the past few weeks, even the worst moments. “Because she most definitely will. It’s about trying to hide the future.”

Bart knows his role in the mission to the past. Wally won’t tell him his.

There’s a bizarre, soft smile on Wally’s face, as if an idea has come to him suddenly. “We used to play a game, with M’gann, where we’d make up memories, and she’d have to guess if they were real or fake. We found out that it really messed with her telepathy, it would force _her_ to _force_ her way in if she wanted to really understand what was made up and what wasn’t.” His laugh is strangely humorless, almost cold.

-

(Bart’s fake memories come from the movies he used to watch with Wally. Strange, childish exploits he found in old classical novels, like buying his mother a fake pearl necklace and crying when he found out the pearls weren’t real, inventing dogs he owned, sitting on Grandpa’s lap and listening to him talk about his old stories, annoying Aunt Dawn as she studied for medical school, waking up every morning, and taking his vitamins with his dad. Waking up every morning to find his cousin Alice waiting for him in his big back garden, where the sun shone and the trees whistled in the wind. 

Some memories get altered, turning the falling ash into bright white snow. Studying with Nightwing and meeting Apollo. He crafts, carefully, a modern utopia of a maternity hospital, but he’ll never forget the moment Wally lowered baby Apollo into his arms, and the fear that burned through his chest.

It hurts, to make all of this up. He’s too afraid to imagine a world where his dad is alive. He sits in front of his picture wall and looks at the sole picture he has of dad, and how dad has blond hair, even when Bart remembers him with red.

(They say Bart looks like him, and somewhere, subconsciously, Bart stopped seeing dad and started seeing himself.)

There is one sole memory of his parent’s that he doesn’t invent, because it’s his first, and most precious. Bart is a child, lying on the floor of the Allen bunk, with his father on one side and his mother on the other.

Bart was safe, with his family, and that’s all he remembers, and all he needs to know.)

-

He doesn’t notice when Wally moves into the Allen bunk, just that gradually, Bart goes to sleep with Wally on the bunk below him, sighing and groaning his way through the night.

Bart’s gone thirteen years wondering about the past, and the world that lived before. Now it’s everywhere, old do-you-remembers coming from all sides, as if they finally dare to discuss the past.

Last time Wally shared a bunk with him, it was before Aunt Dawn moved in, and adjusting to life without his mom hurt more than anything else. Wally had the strangest patience with Bart, equal parts tolerant and equal parts caring.

“Night, Bart.” Wally says from beneath him, sighing into an uncomfortable sleep, their days left in the cave dwindling into single digits.

Bart can’t help but feel like he’s reliving some of the worst times of his life. Only the strange thing about surviving the worst times of your life, is that they sometimes never seem so bad in hindsight, as if they’re just preparation for the real awful times yet to come. Bart feels like he’s been living his life, waiting until the world ends, or everything falls apart. He has to ask himself, not for the first time, if rock bottom is just a soft place to land.

Bart crawls into his top bunk, and hopes Wally sleeps well.

(“What did you do?” Seven year old Bart asked, the memory crawling out of the darkness of his mind.

“Sorry?” Came Wally’s reply, his voice somewhat softer, less pained.

“Y’know, like before the Reach and stuff. Like how grandma did the news.” He twiddled his fingers in the duvet, ignoring how empty the bunk felt, without the hurried whispers of his mother.

“Oh,” He said, very thoughtfully. “I had a PhD in chemistry.”

For a heart shattering moment, Bart wishes he had that innocence back, the kind that rolled off of children in waves, that ask questions only kids wanted to know and questions only kids knew how to phrase. “What’s that?” Bart asked, the excitement bubbling in him.

“I knew a lot about chemistry and I wrote some books about it.” His laugh was gentle, for a quiet sense of humor Bart sometimes didn’t understand. “I was technically a doctor.”

Bart sat up, leaning over the edge of the gasp. He couldn’t really see Wally very well, but through the exit panel above his door, the whites of his eyes were shiny, like little small stars. “Really?! Like Henry?!”

“No, not like Henry. He’s a medical doctor, I’m a doctor of chemistry. Different things.”

Bart huffed, falling back against his pillow. Wally’s warm chuckle rose up from below and settled against his back. “Medical doctors swear an oath, I didn’t have to. That’s normally where it’s different. I just had to promise not to use my knowledge for evil.”

His interest was touched again, eyes peeking down from above. “What’s knowledge?”

“Information, skills, understanding.”

“Huh, cool.” A beat of silence stretched between them. “What’s an oath?”

“Like a promise. Same way Jai promised to marry Henry, and I promised your mom I’d look after you.”

“What’s the oath like?” Anticipation caught in his throat, his mind reeling at all of the things one could promise to the world. Looking back, Bart didn’t know, but who really knew, if the Reach has doctors that swear oaths and doctors who didn’t swear oaths but promised not to use their knowledge for evil. These were questions Bart would never get answers to, because back then, unlike Lian and Nessie and Dean-Harper and Nightwing, Wally didn’t pretend he knew everything, or act like he knew all of the answers all of the time.

He’d always been honest with Bart, brutally and truthfully.

“To help. Or well, at least not to hurt.”)

-

It’s been years since anyone considered the League as superheroes. One morning, Jade comes out of her room, with a folded cloth in her hands, tentatively giving it to Bart.

“Uniforms done. Recycled from a few others. Hope you don’t mind.” She says, and numbly Bart takes it from her, running his hands over the kevlar, the red stripe contrasting the white arms and legs. It doesn’t feel recycled, or well worn, or even old. It feels like Bart’s, a whole new entity, no legacies, no one to follow, just Bart’s costume, made for him.

He puts it on slowly, emerging out into the darkness of the Cave, checking himself in the mirror of his room. He’s grown into his dad’s face, his grandmother’s jaw, his grandfather’s nose and his mother’s thin lips. But he also sees Bart, who has straight teeth he got from no one but himself, and a laugh that sounds like a firework, and sad eyes, red hair that flops over his forehead. He also has a big heart that beats for himself, lungs that make sure he keeps breathing, eyes that see the world around him, and legs that push him forward, even when he doesn’t want to go on.

“What do superheroes do, can I ask?” Bart says, meeting Wally’s green eyes in the mirror behind him.

Wally’s voice is still just as clear, cut across the fifty years he’s travelled, and across death and life, greater than whatever time he’s spent in the Cave. He has a knowing glint in his eyes, almost testing, but Bart can’t help but wonder did he inherit the sadness there too, passed down the Allen-West family like heirlooms. “I think you know the answer to that.”

“To help.” Bart says, as if it’s that simple. “Or, well, at least not to hurt.”

(They leave the Cave three days later.)

**past iii: just blink and we’ll be gone**

Before evening arriving at the HQ, Bart knows that whatever mission brief that’s summoned them is going to be his biggest yet. For starters, they’re called to the Watchtower, hung aloft in space, almost deserted, while the League handles their case. It’s the first time Bart’s been up there, standing frozen as the zeta tube takes him from the Hall of Justice to the satellite.

The first thing he sees, is the world staring back at him, the white clouds are roaming about the blue planet. He sees the green plots of land, traces his eyes around the islands. He feels himself glued to the wide windows, gaping down at this tiny little place that he’s desperate to save.

(In Bart’s time, a mere ten years from where he is standing now, the Watchtower is knocked out of orbit. It will crash into Earth. Most of the League will die on impact. It’s the beginning of the Reach Empire, and the end of League. 

Wally West will survive this, miraculously, because his wife was induced two days before and mother and son will finally leave the hospital. Jai West’s birth saved the original Team, and unknowingly handed them the war against the Reach.

Bart has seen the weight of one action and one choice, but he didn’t really feel it until he tripped the Flash and saved Neutron.)

“If we could get finished and listen up, that’d be swell.” Nightwing sighs, just a twinge more irritable than usual. It’s clear that the last few weeks have been unnaturally stressful for the Team, with the League out of commission, the Reach increasing their hold, and the Light still looming above them, with nowhere to hide. Batgirl stands to his right, sending concerned glances in between checking the screens in front of them.

People are still flitting in from the zeta tubes, the signals going on and off around the room. Bart keeps craning his neck every few minutes, waiting to hear Jaime’s designation ring through. It’s been four days of radio silence, entirely different to the few weeks of with Jaime as the Reach front-man, because at least this time Bart knows he’s safe, tucked away in El Paso, with his parents that love him and no alien vessel whispering ideations of mass destruction into his ear.

It’s the little things, Bart reasons, and watches the room fill.

“Jeez,” Someone says behind him, tapping him on the shoulder. “This really is an ambush if they’re asking me to step in.”

Wally looks wonderfully at ease in his Kid Flash uniform, a far cry from the awkward, tense, retired superhero Bart met back in February. Wally’s utter intolerance to him outshined any awe and amazement he had of seeing Wally so young, in the best shape of his life, wearing his old uniform. It was the first major challenge of the past; pretending like that hadn’t hurt as much as it did.

(Wally has always been the Flash. Even when Don and Dawn were still running, even when Alice and Jay could lap him.)

“Hey old man!” Bart says, deciding at the last second that a hug wouldn’t be awkward or weird. “They dragged you out of your cave!”

“And what? Miss a showdown like this? I couldn’t let the newbies have all the fun.”

Wally is actually disturbingly at ease with the whole thing, an odd twinkle in his eye, a strange excitement in the way his hands won’t keep still, the way he’s tapping his foot with the slightest burst of speed. Bart looks at him quizzically.

“What the hell does Nightwing have planned?” Wally’s lip jerks when he crows. “C’mon! Tell me!”

Wally winks at him, something he’s done countless times in the Future, but this time there’s a genuine secret behind it, deserving of all of his ticks and twitches. “All in good time, my good cousin.” He says with a flourish, leaving Bart gaping.

In that moment, the zeta tube flares, Jaime walking through the tunnel in his civvies. His shoulders hunch forward, as he drags himself to the computer, not before sparing a long, languid glance out at the universe around him, the stars caught in his eyes.

“I hope he’s alright.” Wally mutters to Bart, taking the words out of his mouth before he could say them.

“Yeah.” Bart swallows, watching how his friend seemed to curl in on himself. The Watchtower has such a way of making you feel small, and Bart can’t imagine how Jaime must feel. “I hope so too.”

(Bart wants to say I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for putting you through that. I’m sorry for knowing this would happen. I’m sorry for letting it happen.)

(“I think Blue Beetle was just a kid that got taken advantage of, and we didn’t realise until it was too late.” Wally will say that, sometime in the future, in a Reach workcamp wearing an inhibitor collar. This is what Bart prevented, and it’s like a weight has been lifted.)

Bart can check in with him later, he reasons, when Nightwing clears his throat, and the buzzing Watchtower comes to a quiet murmur.

The end of the Reach is so close, Bart feels like he can stretch out and hold it, open his eyes and see it, like all of a sudden, the sacrifices made to get him there will mean something.

And even with Wally standing next to him, Bart can’t help but wonder what his Wally would say about how far he’s come.

(Bart had a few ideas of how the time machine would look, but it was nothing like what he saw it, finally for the first time.

“It only seats one?”

Nathaniel cocked his head, looking puzzled. “Did Wally not tell you that?”)

-

No one really said anything when Bart clung to Artemis and cried and cried and cried. His last memory of Artemis in the future was one where he was being careless and reckless and didn’t know that one day he’d ask for all of those memories back.

“Well, hi to you too!” She’d laughed, and only cried a little bit herself. Bart can imagine, easily, all of the stress everyone was under to keep this hidden, and suddenly all of Wally’s weird attitudes and quirks over the past few months makes sense.

It made sense, to Bart’s anger, and Wally lets him bang his fists against his chest until he calms down.

(When Aunt Dawn died, when Artemis died for the first time, Wally let him scream and howl and shout until his voice was rubbed raw.)

“I thought it was my fault.” Bart says, lamely, his fists unfolding. “I thought since I saved Grandpa, Artemis died instead of him. I thought I killed her. I thought-”

“I know Bart.” Wally says, and all of his guilt seems to fall off his shoulders, but it’s still trapped in his eyes.

-

Bart has always been faster than Wally. In the future and in the past.

“Bart! We have to slow down more! Try and siphon off the energy attacking Wally!”

Bart’s used to doing that.

When he was younger, and didn’t understand the trickwires and all of the steps the League went to to protect the Cave, he’d go too far, run too fast, and it was always Wally that had to pull him back. He’d keep him safe when no one else would.

“It’s no good, Barry! Oh man, Artemis is so gonna kill me for this. And don’t even get me started on mom and dad!”

“Kid!”

In the wind, Bart feels his head start to spin, that rising panic coming up his throat. This couldn’t be happening; not here, not now, not when everything Wally had asked him to do was finally coming true.

Wally’s voice is barely audible over the wind, and his form blurs and fades. “Just tell them, okay?”

(Dust and ashes dust and ashes, the Cave’s left corridor collapsed and the after-shocks lasted for days. Wally never did believe it was a natural disaster, an earthquake maybe that caused it. He’d put too much trust in the earth for it to let him down, when he moved his family down there all those years ago, too much trust to believe it would take his wife and cousin and friends.)

There was a bright light like this last time, when one minute Wally was smiling and the next minute he wasn’t. In Bart’s world, Wally lives for thirty more years, graduates college, gets married, has two children, and tries, desperately, to save the world.

In this world, in the past Bart has come to love and yearn and care for, Wally dies because he wasn’t fast enough, because Bart was too fast, because the Reach, even here, when Bart had power to stop them, still took the people he loved from him.

Bart feels, briefly, while the Team huddle around each other, while Barry collapses into the snow, that he’s back in the future, with no hope forward and no hope back.

But the snow falls heavier and heavier, and Bart holds his hand out, to see if it’s the soft touch of the soot in the air. When the Reach razed Mount Justice, the fire burned for days, and it was the closest to the sun Bart had ever come. 

He can hear Artemis’ sobs over the wind.

The snow melts in his palm.

-

The Reach invasion rescinds quickly, Bart realises, when some of the grief-haze is gone. Any trace of the Reach seems to vanish from the earth in mere days. The vending machines are gone, the drink plants stripped down to their foundations, the Reach-tech eggs are destroyed.

For the first time in Bart’s life, he’s living in a world without the Reach.

It’s a relief he shares with himself.

(There’s some people Bart misses with all his heart from the future, and freedom has a price.)

This time, it’s twenty two year old Wally, who wasn’t supposed to die for another thirty years.

“I just can’t believe he’s gone.” Tim’s the last to verbalise it, his wary, cautious thoughts coming to a conclusion.

Everyone on the Team deals differently. Wally was 003, even people who didn’t work with him knew him, because he was always at the back of everyone’s mind. Bart can only assume that they all thought someday, he’d come back to them, and the glory days would return and everything would go back to normal.

The League act accordingly.

“Is therapy really necessary?” Bart asks, rubbing the back of his neck. “I like Black Canary and all, but isn’t grief a bit more of a… personal situation?”

(It is for him, at least.)

M’gann shakes her head, looking up from the tablet in her hand. Her heartbreak is written all over her face, caught in her honey eyes. “It’s what we do after difficult missions.” She says, tiredly. M’gann puts her hand on his shoulder. “Believe it or not, but it helps, just to talk to someone else about it.”

(Joan and Jay’s house is cold and silent, and he can’t even go to Barry and Iris’ anymore, not when Iris seemed to take up the whole house, like there was never enough room for all of her grief.)

(Bart is worried about Iris, and the vacant look in her eyes.)

(“He was my first baby.” Was all Iris said, when Bart’s hair was still soaked from the snow, and his ears were ringing from the wind. Bart didn’t really understand until he remembered Apollo, and how for those three short years, his life seemed to spin around him.)

Black Canary welcomes him in, smiling nicely, after asking his family, how Central City is in the summertime. The public memorial for the first Kid Flash goes public in the town hall, mourners in red and yellow flocking to sign the book of condolences. Wally gets a hologram in the Watchtower, the grotto long gone to the Reach, but he also gets a statue in Central City, already being drafted, with a team of sculptures coming in from all around the country, imported Vlatavan marble.

It’s been a strange few weeks.

“I’m sorry we haven’t spoken much, given everything that’s happened.” She says, that pleasant smile still stuck on her face. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Bart.” Dinah says, and says it with genuine empathy, like her heart is broken too. 

Maybe it is. Bart remembers hearing from M’gann that Canary would personally oversee the team in the early days, when the concept of sidekicks working independently together was still so foriegn.

(“I’m so sorry for your loss.” He’s five, his father has just died, and it’s the beginning sign of gentle desperation in everyone’s faces.)

“It’s not really me you should be saying that to.” Bart says, instead, only wanting to get out of the room, and run up and down the East Coast until the seasalt is stuck in his hair forever.

Dinah cocks her head, frowning. “He’s your family, isn’t he?”

(It just feels like he’s not entitled to this grief. There’s so, so, so much of it, when he’s already mourned and felt that pain. At home, Iris hasn’t left her bed yet and Barry’s still on leave at work. The whole West-Allen clan is caught in a torrent that has no bounds.)

Bart’s grieving process is tried and tested, and he doesn’t have room for therapy, or opening up to someone who doesn’t understand.

“I didn’t know him. Not the way everyone else did.”

Dinah looks at him for a moment, an unreadable expression on her face, the pleasant smile gone, only a memory on the corners of her lips.

“Bart,” She joins her hands together on her knee, still staring intently. “M’gann and J’onn say you have some of the strongest mental shields they’ve ever come across. Did you know that?”

Bart swallow thickly, blinking once, twice, three times before answering her. “Uh, no, I didn’t actually.”

“Did someone teach you?” Dinah asks plainly.

(First time Bart met Miss Martian, he felt her in his head almost instantly, less like the bright warmth of Tabby, more subtle but more sinister. It felt violating, and wary, and all M’gann found was the same fabricated memory of watching Barry Allen blow out birthday candles.)

“Ah, see, that’s confidential.” He taps his head with two fingers.

Dinah’s lips tug upwards. “I understand you were sent here to stop the Reach Invasion. Makes sense that you’d need to be able to keep telepaths out of your head and seeing the state of the future.” Her face softens, too gentle for Bart to handle. “But the invasion is over. You don’t have to keep them up all the time.”

“I’m not hiding anything.” Bart says too quickly, suddenly slipping at the seams, as his grasp on who he is in the past gets looser and looser.

“Who said anything about hiding?”

“You have no idea how relieved I am now that the invasion is done. That’s the only thing I’m hiding. There. That’s your answer.”

Dinah nods. “Then what’s next? Getting back to the future?”

Bart stops, caught off guard. “Sorry?” His chest falls, his lungs settling against his spine.

“I’m sure you have family, friends, people you care about in the future?” She continues, her tone disturbingly nonchalant. People asked him, of course, about the world he’d left behind, but he’d always manage to fluff himself out of it, crack a few jokes, convince everyone that the future was better than it really was, and that someday, he desperately wanted to go home, because what was distance when you could time travel–yet to be invented in the next twenty years–and go back and see them again?

(But that future didn’t exist anymore, and even the people he loved were gone.)

As if Dinah can see his torment, she leans forward, her eyes kind. “I’m sorry Bart, we don’t have to talk about anything else, not if you don’t want to.”

Bart’s chest heaves, his ribs falling to catch his heart. His head starts to throb, feeling like it's being ripped apart as his lungs push less and less air through his body. Reality seems to sink through him, through the chair and down into the floorboards, as he looks up, and for the first time, Bart understands the world he’s living in.

He survived the mission he swore to die on.

(The admission is hard enough. Bart has rarely felt this grateful to be alive.)

Wally is dead. He’s alive. There’s no need to keep his mental shields up. The Reach is gone. So is Wally. Bart is alive. The future is fixed. The Reach is defeated. Wally died in the Arctic. Bart is alive.

(But it’s been the longest year of his life. He turned fourteen and didn’t even notice.)

“Bart.” He looks up suddenly, as Dinah pulls his head away from his chest. His head must’ve fell forward, and he didn’t even notice. “Are you with me Bart?”

“Wally was the only family I had left in the future.” Bart says. He’s never said it out loud before. “And it was my fault he died.”

**present iii: i need the darkness, someone please cut the lights**

The Outsiders is a lot more press than Bart is used to. It’s almost reminiscent of the early days of vigilantism, when reporters like Lois Lane and Iris West were climbing through battlegrounds and debris to get a brief word with the masked heroes. It feels oddly full circle, to stand for the cameras and the microphones, attend the press panels, getting jogged around by liaison officers. The League has been public, but never this public.

In the early days of Kid Flash, he couldn’t keep his face out of the news. Wally was thirteen when he became Kid Flash, and with that became the darling of Central City practically overnight. The Outsiders cuts into his time with Barry, and despite being educated by some of the smartest people in the future, Bart has school to focus on.

“At least you’re not in college.” Jaime sighs, running a hand down his face, his books still left open on his desk from before they were called out for the mission. “Sociology is fun and all, but does there have to be so much reading.”

“That’s on you for choosing to go to college.” Bart snipes back, flopping onto Jaime’s bed. He always made sure to zeta home before the morning came, so Jay wasn’t alone when he woke up.

Jaime shakes his head. “I kinda see why Wally and Artemis left the Team when they got to freshman year.”

It’s a small thing, but Bart peers his head up, his yellow chin rubbing off the tip of the lightning bolt. “You thinking of quitting on us, buddy?” It’s an unspoken fear, but Bart doesn’t know how much more of the media circus he can take without his best friend.

“No, not at all.” Jaime reassures, and just for good measure nudges Bart’s knee that’s propped up behind him. There’s that bothering, fluttering feeling in his stomach when he smiles, under his ribcage. Jaime is the best friend Bart has been in love with since he was thirteen, but Jaime has Traci and Bart loves her too much to ever do anything about it.

Jaime carries on. “It’s just hard, that’s all. Being on the Outsiders kinda feels like a third job, y’know? There’s the missions, then school, then always being ready for the media? It was easier when we were covert.”

What Bart loves about the Outsiders is how efficient it is. They help the Team, help the League, help all of the confused metahumans across America and the globe understand. It’s a position of power that matters to Bart, but it’s worse when the cameras come out, and he can’t find where Bart ends and Kid Flash begins; the ways where Bart Allen, the speedster, and Kid Flash, the superhero, are different.

(It feels just a bit too much like the first months in the past, over three years ago, and he wore his Bart Allen mask as tightly as his Impulse one.)

“Sounds sorta flashy.” Wally says, while they watch a newsreel of the Outsiders breaking into another warehouse in the middle of the midwest, full of confused teenagers with an array of abilities. “Like. A special team just for showing how good the League are?”

They’re sitting on Wally’s bedroom floor in Kansas, ransacking his room for his old college textbooks. Wally is aiming to head back for Stanford to finish his final year in the Spring Semester of 2020. Artemis moved out of Palo Alto after her own graduation, and left Wally’s stuff in his parents house, a museum to the life he had. Bart was in the area, he claimed, diligently ignoring the rest of the world.

“It’s better if you don’t think of it like propaganda.” Bart says, with a nervous chuckle.

In Bart’s future, the Blue Beetle of 2019 has already become the spokesperson of the Reach Empire. He saves babies from burning buildings, catches cats when they get caught in trees, walks elderly people across the street and also, beats the shit out of rooky rogues. In four years his philosophy is less of the kind, humanitarian stuff, and more on creating a solid bridge of trust between civilisation and the prospect of working for the Reach, helping them complete their goal for mankind. A symbiotic relationship, with give and take and plenty of resources for every species.

(That went unbelievably south.)

“It’s kinda propaganda.” Wally says instead, zipping into the other room and returning a second later with another box from the attic.

“Isn’t all press, good press? Besides, it’s Gar’s world, I’m just living in it!”

It’s insane, watching Wally navigate the world around him, like he’s pushing through a different dimension, only briefly returning to theirs when he needs to slow down. He’s shaky with his brakes, the way Bart was when he first arrived, and he hasn’t quite been able to handle the sudden acceleration he has now. The lightning is something he’s sworn he’ll never get used to; how it cracks against the sky when he gets going.

Wally breeches the speed of light. Officially, he’s the fastest person on the planet. But confidentially, Bart doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it.

(He’s described it as before and after. Bart gets that, primarily because he’s lived two lives, one in the future and one in the past, and both are far, distant cries from one another, and he’s desperately trying to find some relation between the two. The only relation is right in front of him.)

“I think Gar being a sitcom star is the last thing I expected.” Wally says aloud, sitting back on his hunches.

“How come?”

“He just seemed…” Wally trails off, looking at the stack of books in his hands. His editions are out of date by at least three years, not the longest amount of time, but Wally looks at the world now like it’s a memorial in honor of what he missed. “So devoted to the life, y’know? He had to beg M’gann to even let him go to mission briefings. He used to turn into an ant and hide around the Cave to listen in.”

“You took a break though.” Bart points out, his conversation with Jaime echoing. “And you wanted it so badly you blew yourself up.”

“Priorities change, I guess.” Wally shrugs, and when his fingers twitch, Bart can see the slightest pulse of blue electricity between them.

-

Barry announces his retirement like a man would share the weather report, but his prediction is as severe as a grade five hurricane, with a deadpan expression.

Bart is the only person that’s surprised. Even Wally’s parents look unphased.

“You’re doing what?!” He cries, leaning so far forward he gets mashed potatoes on his shirt.

“You didn’t tell Bart?” Iris glares at Barry, crossing her arms. “You said you’d tell him privately!”

“He had an Outsiders mission! I couldn’t just tell him over text!; 'Hey, bud, I’m retiring l-o-l see you at Tuesday night dinner. Stay safe out there.'”

Bart just gapes at his grandparents, watching as they bicker between themselves quickly. Barry seems to lose the argument, turning around to face Bart, guilt plain on his face. It’s in that moment, that Bart can see how tired his grandfather looks, how even if his physical aging is slower than average, it doesn’t hide the stress in his eyes, or the wariness in his body.

“I’ve been offered a job, Bart. A good one. Lecturing in Central City University. Hours are better for looking after the twins so Iris can go back to work.” With a heavy sigh, a complicated sigh, Barry shakes his head. “The twins are nowhere near ready to go to daycare with other kids.”

Dawn and Donny are like baby foals, tripping over themselves and each other. They’re not even three years old yet, barely even toddlers, who can’t speak very well but considers running, and speed, and being fast as natural as eating and crying and breathing.

“So who’s gonna be the Flash?” Bart cries, his chest already tightening at the idea of him in the suit, suddenly remembering the first time he put on the Kid Flash one after Wally died. He’d felt like a fake, a child in a costume, pretending to be better than he was, even with Wally’s blessing. The world couldn’t function with a Kid Flash without the Flash, but becoming the Flash was so against everything Bart came to the past for.

Then a quiet cough comes from beside him, Wally wiping his face with his napkin. “I think that’d be me.” He says, his voice awry.

Bart knows about the suit. The suit. Made by the same master seamstress the League goes to for all of their costumes. Bart’s been before, getting his suit altered around his height, adding the shoulder pads, changing his goggles.

(He goes to Tim about changing the goggles, after getting too distraught at the red world spinning in front of him. The Scarab came with its own suit, and while Jaime understands the weight of being a part of a legacy, Tim is the third Robin, after Jason Todd was Robin, after Dick Grayson was Robin.

“It’s your suit now.” Was all he said. He added a hood to his own costume, made it darker. He’s less like the eager kid Bart met when he crashed in the Cave, and closer to the man Bart grew up with.)

It’s a suit for Wally, if he ever considered running again. It’s so unlike Barry’s suit, all of Bart’s memories and pictures of Wally-as-the-Flash get contorted, trapped in the future, where Wally doesn’t have a choice or a say in when or how he becomes the Flash.

The questions on the tip of his tongue, just behind his teeth. Wally’s smile is uneasy, like he’s nervous too.

“I think I’m ready.” Wally says, answering what he wants to know. “At least I think I am. And I know Barry and Aunt Iris wouldn’t’ve offered it if I wasn’t ready.” Wally’s eyes stretch to them, sitting across him. “They know me better than anyone, at this point.”

(In all of the times Bart had imagined becoming Kid Flash, the far-fetched dream of having Wally as his Flash was always at the forefront. The world would be better, would be right, and the Reach would melt away and it would just be them, the way it always was.)

“So, what do you say Kid Flash? You don’t mind being my sidekick?”

Only in this world, Wally is younger, Wally isn’t keeping a Cave full of people alive, Wally isn’t burdened with the stress of saving the world. Hearing Wally ask him, is better than the Reach falling, better than joining the Outsiders, better than saving all of those metakids.

“Eh-heh! Sidekick! What happened to protege?!”

(Wally seems to hear Bart’s second voice, loud and clear, and they draft up a patrol rota over dessert.) 

-

Fourth week of patrols, Bart can’t really describe what’s got him feeling so awful. He gets so annoyed he puts too much force into his punch, and ends up cracking a goon’s nose, watching the blood run down his fist and onto the ground. Nose bleeds always look worse than they are.

“Dude!” Wally cries, running next to him before he can react. “That was too much!”

“It was self-defense!” Bart says, grimacing at how the red kevlar shines.

Wally looks at him for a second, scrutinizing him from behind the windows of his mask. Nothing was stranger than seeing Wally’s green eyes peering out at him, how his red hair seemed to curl over his forehead, on their first patrol. Wally’s suit has silver accents, matching the trail of lightning that blazes after him, and it’s utterly different to Barry’s suit, and utterly different to the pictures from when Wally took the Flash handle, all the way back in 2016. With a sigh, he pulls at Bart’s goggles until they snap back on his face.

“You’re a dumbass, you know that?” Wally says, crossing his arms. “If you weren’t up to it, you should’ve just told me.”

“And miss a patrol? And miss this?” Bart says, gesturing to the house robbery they’d successfully stopped. The police had come and gone, pushing a dozen guys into the squad cars, one with a badly messed up nose. “Besides,” he carries on, scuffing his shoe against the ground. “I am up to it!”

“Then what’s wrong?” Wally prods, the wind ruffling through his hair. “Or am I gonna have to chase it out of you?”

“Why should I tell you? You just called me a dumbass.”

“Your teen angst can’t have a body count, Bart.” The reference soars over his head, judging by how smug Wally looks. “Y’know, Barry used to let me take nights off if I wasn’t in the mood. I was a teenager, moonlighting as a superhero. You can’t do everything and get through puberty well-adjusted without a few breaks.” He sucks in a breath, earnest eyes staring at him, the same color as his own. He must see the irritation in Bart’s face, and backs down with his palms held up. “Jeez Bart, I just wanna help.”

(Sometimes Wally says things that splits him in half, and on one side he’s twenty four and bitching in his ear about how fast their going and how sloppy his turns are and if he’s doing his homework. And on the other side he’s older, he’s someone’s husband, someone’s father, someone’s grandfather. The best person Bart knew.)

Bart looks at him tentatively, the pain from earlier catching up with him. It’s easier to push everything down when he’s running, like how every cell in his body just goes on auto-pilot. Maybe Wally gets that; he was also a superhero teenager, with his own problems with relationships and drama. 

He relents, sighing dramatically as he falls onto the curb, taking full advantage of the dark and silence of Central City suburbs at three in the morning. He pats the ground next to him with one red glove, motioning for Wally to sit next to him.

“So what’s bugging you?” Wally’s beside him instantly, exhaling a stream of white cloud.

“Well, basically. I guess, the thing is-” Bart starts and stops, trying to collect his thoughts on everything. “Basically, after the last Outsiders mission, me n’ Cassie were making some grub, totally crash, I love Cassie, and she started talking about her anniversary with Tim! Which, y’know, that’s crash too.

“Then, she asked me about if there was anyone if I liked, or if there was anybody in school I’m interested in, or on the team or whatever, and well. I thought, ‘Jeez, why not tell her about how I’ve been thinking of asking–only considering!–Jaime out, because it’s been like at least three months since him and Traci broke up–remember I told you about that? It was amicable though it’s all good–’and then she started freaking her shit saying maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea and-”

“Bart, I know I can understand you when you talk this fast, but you need to slow down.” Wally says, then shuffles awkwardly, in the most Wally way until he’s sitting directly across from him. “But, Jaime, then? Not really what I was expecting.”

Bart pulls back, eyeing him curiously. “You’re not a homophobe, are you? You’re not a homophobe in the future-”

“Of course I’m not a homophobe!” Wally exclaims, but to Bart’s surprise he’s laughing. “I just didn’t think it was Jaime you had a crush on. I thought it was someone like… that Ed kid, or something?”

“Ed!? Ed!? You think I-”

“But anyway, Jaime. Carry on.”

Bart sighs, promising himself he’d come back to the Ed topic. “Well, Cassie said there wouldn’t be a point in asking him out, because Jaime would probably say no because I’m only sixteen. Which I think is totally bogus! It’s like, what, three years? That doesn’t matter.”

Wally is quiet for a second, his lips curling down for a second. Bart narrows his eyes, leaning forward.

“Unless, you think it matters?”

Wally looks uncomfortable, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. He doesn’t shrug exactly, but rather lets out a whole-body exhale, shuddering in the January night. “I mean, she’s right? Jaime’s turning twenty this year, you’re turning seventeen.”

Bart blinks, feeling somewhat confused. “That didn’t matter in the future.” He says instead, moving away from Wally.

“It matters here, Bart. And it might matter to Jaime.” Without hesitation, Wally claps a hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently. Distantly, Bart gets that it’s easy to fixate on Jaime not wanting an age-gap as big as that between them, as opposed to the scary reality that he probably doesn’t like him back, wouldn’t want him like that, wouldn’t love him the way Bart wants to be loved.

There’s a weird pressure behind his eyes, hot and stinging and Bart hates how it makes him feel. Wally seems to see through him.

“I’m sorry, Bart.” Wally says, and he means it, and it even manages to make Bart feel marginally better. “It sucks when the person you like doesn’t like you back. I’ve been there, honestly.”

It’s almost impossible to imagine Wally feeling the way he’s feeling, because Bart has never not known Wally to be without Artemis, save for a few select months in both the past and future.

“Yeah, right.” He’s crying now, half-embarrassment, half-shame, all making him feel confused. Wally frowns, his other hand reaching out, less like an act of comfort, and more like he’s trying to subdue a distressed animal.

Bart’s good at pushing down the future, acting like that part of his life didn’t happen, that he didn’t live in a Cave system underground with the last of the League. He’s good at pretending as if once, he didn’t know what true desperation was like, and knew nothing else.

No one cried in the future. No one sat around and wallowed in the darkness they were in. Stopping, for a split second, to look at the world unfolding around you meant giving everything up.

And three years in the past has taught Bart that it’s okay to cry over the small, minimal things, like the weather being bad, losing your job, having a shit day, being sixteen, and boys not loving you back.

“Why the fuck am I crying?” Bart ignores all of that, pushing a hand into his face.

“It’s okay to cry because someone doesn’t like you back, Bart. I’m so sorry it’s happening to you, but it makes us human, you know that, right?” Wally says, gently, a rueful smile on his face. In that moment, he sounds like the Wally Bart left in the future, and it just sets him right off again.

“No, it’s not.” Bart reels. In a haggard movement, he’s off the curb, stalking off down the street before he realises he’s moving. Without his speed, he feels like he’s walking through syrup, but he’s afraid of what running will give him if he sets off. The white light looming at the beginning of the speed force is always comforting, warm and bright.

“In the future, you don’t moan and whine and bitch when some guy doesn’t like you. You cry because you’re hungry, because you work for the Reach, because your friends are all getting picked off one by one!” He yells, balling his fists. He feels himself vibrating on the side of the street, as everything curdles and storms inside of him.

(Control, control, control, control. Always about control, keeping it in so no one sees. When would Bart be able to just exhale and not feel guilt for standing in the clear air.)

(Honestly, he has no idea where this is coming from. Poor Wally, just back from the dead, having to deal with all of Bart’s shit, just like he had to in life.)

“I left, millions, billions of people to rot in the future, for what? To cry when a boy doesn’t like me back?!” With a mangled laugh, as if he’s only just seen the reality in front of him, Bart carries on, his eyes trained on the yellow street lights. “Because Blue fucking Beetle doesn’t like me back. Make it make sense, Wally, because it doesn’t make sense to me!”

(Dinah calls it survivor's guilt. Thinking of the future sends him into some self-deprecating, self-loathing spiral where all he can see is-)

“Jaime isn’t that Blue Beetle here Bart, and you know that.” Wally reasons, his eyes stern. He’s thrown his cowl off, his face plain under the moonlight. It’s risky, and dangerous, but it’s comforting, at least for a split second, to see his face. He must think Bart’s crazy, deranged, unable to detach himself from a life he should just leave and let die.

(It doesn't work that way.)

“He’s still Blue Beetle! Blue Beetle worked with the Reach and made everything awful and Blue Beetle killed you!”

Bart doesn’t remember anything after that, just feeling his voice go raw, hearing his voice, distantly, like it wasn’t really his, screaming in his ears, feeling his teeth grind and shift, Wally’s arms around him, and the speed welcoming him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay jaime is a sociology major bc you KNOW hes gonna specialise in extra terrestrial societies and go on to becoming the sole reach sociologist . ngl all i really want is for jaime to have his arrival moment .  
> I need to clarify that if meg and conner get married in july 2019 then we’ve just abt turned into 2020 by the time wally becomes the flash in the january ! thank you for reading !!! i hope you enjoyed !!!

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading ! I hope you enjoyed, especially the original characters ! comments and kudos are always loved !


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